World Class RevOps Ownership, Execution & Tooling with Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly

If I emailed you Noah and I was like, Hey, we have a new product fit to automate your support tickets. Do you want to talk? I'd be like, no. But if I said, no, I was taking a look at your account, the volume of tickets increased by 25% last quarter, your upwards of 6,000 a month. And I saw that your team is growing by 20%. You've got a team now of 80 people that's so incredible. Congratulations. I can also see that your customers are feeling the pain of your success with an MPS court decreasing. Customers like you like deal and, you know, Personio and I'll do competitors of yours. I've had a lot of success automating the top 20% of your support tickets with Finn. Do you want to have a conversation and see if it's a fit? If I share, I'm going to take that meeting and you're going to look at it and one of the things that we do is like, okay, great. If we were to build exactly this, where are the complexities? What part of the requirements are going to create a beast, a little spaghetti monster that you're not going to want to manage, so we push back on those. So I would apply the same thing there and say, could the strategy be that, hey, Revops is going to build the infrastructure. We're going to get clasted up. We're going to integrate it. We're going to make sure that you're trained up on it, et cetera. And then there's this concept of a water line of like, hey, what am I allowed to do and not allow to do? And how do we lower that water line? So you're allowed to do as much as you want. That's the ethos that I've always had as an operator. I want my go-to-market team. I want folks to be able to be creative, to be able to test things out, to be able to move quickly. Welcome to the GTM engineer, where we share the hidden stories, cheat codes, and mental models behind the rise of GTM engineering in AI and sales and marketing. I'm your host Noah Adelstein. Today I head on Jenny Garchwa, the CEO and founder at Go Nimbley. Go Nimbley is a Revops agency that does both fractional Revops work for a smaller number of clients, as well as software implementations of tools like Clangong for hundreds of businesses each year. Jenny Go Nimbley work with companies like Intercom, Zendesk, Twilio, and Vanta. Jenny has seen Revops and Go-to-market tooling evolved dramatically over her 10 years running Go Nimbley. We had a fun and thought-provoking conversation about how Jenny's the past, present, and future of Go-to-market operations in tooling. We get into how Go Nimbley best supports their clients, and why Jen generally speaking does not recommend outsourcing your Revops. We talk about powerful use cases Jen has put into action with companies like Intercom. How to build signal prioritization and alerting engines for sales, Jen talks about why the software tool sprawl has become so problematic and what she suggests companies do about it. We talk about the role of Revops versus growth versus GTM engineering, future trends, Jen is paying attention to, and much more. If you want to find more content from the GTM engineer, don't forget to follow us on Spotify and subscribe to our subsac. There's also a link in the show notes to join the GTM engineer lab and upcoming community of GTM and aspiring GTM engineers. With that, here's Jen. Hope you learn something useful. Jen, welcome to the GTM engineer. Thanks for coming on. Now your podcast voice came on. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. I've seen your LinkedIn posts and just generally heard great things about you for quite a while, so really looking forward to the conversation. Do you want us to start with a little bit of your background and what you're working on now? Yeah, I mean, I'll talk a career first. I started off my career at a company called Blue Wolf, and they were a really big partner of sales force. So folks that have been kind of in the CRM space. Might know Blue Wolf. It was later sold to IBM. And the entire company was pretty much focused on sales, sales automation, CRM, all that good stuff. And I was brought in for their marketing automation team. And so it was a really kind of interesting and frustrating experience that I was very focused, top of funnel, and the entire organization was focused elsewhere, but it turned out to be a gift because I got very passionate about alignment between teams and breaking down silos. And people will talk about silos, people's silos all day, but there's tech silos and data silos and process silos and got very obsessed with marketing and sales hating each other when they should both be like super aligned and hate finance. So that was kind of the beginning of my career. I had a little aha moment and went off on my own with my business partner Troy and started GoNimbley and we're a Rebops agency. We are next week going to hire our 100th person. Wow. Feeling like a really big milestone. And we're working with really really incredible brands, Intercom, Twelio, Zendest, Ganta, and we're doing all the work that Rebops entails and we can get kind of into that. So that's been super fulfilling. And then I also own a game company. So I make physical board games, like $25 board games that you buy at stores. It's a completely different business. And we've done really well with a couple of big games. Just got picked up by Walmart and Target. So that's, yeah. That's awesome. So 100th employee all time or you guys are like, you guys currently would have. No, like currently. Yeah, we've gone through many more. But yeah, 100. And is everybody based in the US? US, it'll let them in a couple in a meal. Okay. And do you share roughly how many clients you guys are working with at any given time? Okay. So there's two two parts of our business. So it'll really range our core business that we call our fractional revops business that like companies are spending anywhere from like one you grant a month upwards of six, like more than six figures a month for a really large clients. And there will typically have less than 50 customers at any given point. And then we have our partnerships motion with companies like play and gong. Like, for example, for gong in the past, like year and a half, two years, we've done 600 implementations. So then there's a ton of customers on that front because it's one time implementations for six weeks type of it. Oh, interesting. And it's implementations of different offer calls. For example, yeah, you're coming in you maybe you already had gong and you're getting another, you know, you're getting forecast or you don't have it and we come in and implement it. And for the kind of mid market, that can be a pretty quick project. If we're doing an enterprise gong implementation, yeah, the months and months. Yeah, it's interesting to hear you guys working even with like larger companies because my intuition would be like, okay, like most of these companies probably have in house rub off themes. And so how do you guys sort of fit into into that? Great question. So a little bit of a hot take, I don't believe that you should outsource your revops. You know, there's there's some of this concept of revops in the service that I think there's a little funky because this is a really pivotal. If you believe the revenue operations is a strategic function and that function needs to have deep relationships with your go-to marketing, they also need to be really aligned to sea level. He need to be on the all hands, you need to be, you know, part of the business. So I believe in building that team and basically wear that agility for that team. So maybe you hire a great business-minded revenue operations strategic resource to lead the team, but they don't have the executional resourcing or the hands-on keyboard work and you need folks that know clay and hubs fly and Marquetto and Salesforce, etc. whatever your tech stack is, we're basically going to be that extra team or flip it. Maybe you've got a really technical leader and they need support on the more strategic that are also forecasting whatever else. We're going to do that. We're basically going to flash with with a team and even very large companies either have just a giant backlog that they need help with or they've got special projects like a CPQ implementation that they need to spike that their team can't do, but they're not going to hire for just that project. And so we're basically kind of fitting in and giving folks that agility. Okay, that makes complete sense. Do you have any projects you've worked on recently or you're working on now that have been particularly fun? So many, there's a couple of trends that and we can get into massive amounts of trends that I think are affecting our our industry, but there is there's two things kind of going on right now that at the same time I think there's a focus on core on what I would call foundations and data integrity and architecture making sure things are set up well because of the pressure of AI like I can't do anything interesting without with data. And then at the same time, I think revenue operators are more excited to build. And so they're starting to take more risks and build automations and there's definitely like an emphasis on on time savings, especially for sellers and automating their workflow. And so it's kind of interesting to be in the in the helm of those two. So we still have a lot of great core projects like data integrity, deduping, account hierarchy, territories, all that kind of work. And then at the same time we're testing out things like, I don't know, playing with gong transcripts and using you know, some clay and and sometimes like a tool like dust to create interfaces for folks to basically have like work. So the customer moments in our comfort example a few years ago went from sales led to PLG, you usually see the opposite or PLS. So we've been doing a lot of really interesting work with product usage specifically for the product fin and being able to elevate expansion opportunities and renewal risk and adoption risk over to the go to market team in a super kind of fun skill of a way by looking at signals. And so it runs the gamut. Yeah. Wait, and so in that example, because I think the whole like, how are you using your product usage data to go either figure out renewals or upsells, et cetera, is a very undervalued or appreciated kind of surface area? Is that a lot of looking at the data of existing usage and then playing up patterns or is it also later on like third party signals and intent to go try to figure out like who might be ripe or maybe all the both. But I do think your first party data is gold and you shouldn't slip on it. We are looking at like a mix imagine and we're doing this across a bunch of customers. So for sure, you can look at your own product signals. You can look at your own interactions with your marketing, et cetera. You can look at third party intent signals. You can even look at research. You can look at things that are happening in the industry, maybe not with that particular company to be trigger points for discussion. I think the real difference of the way that we used to do this work and the way that we're doing it now is when I first started consulting, it was all about, okay, great, we're going to implement a lead scoring program. And sometimes we looked at product usage. Zendesk was one of our early customers and we looked at trial like could they start a trial? When is it expiring? Did they log in? This isn't that new. That was 10 years ago that we were doing that. We're basically like wanting to consolidate these signals. And instead of sending a customer like we used to, hey, lead score 70 lead source webinar, how about it? We are now really focusing on that rep experience of saying, hey, when I get a lead quote unquote, I need to be able to know why. So like what are the signals, whether it's marketing signals, whether it's product signals that are going on, what is the play here? Is this an expansion play? Is it a new business play? And what's a recommended next action? And ideally, I've also got a button and sends that information to an LLM and brings back the first draft of an email and I'm off to the races. And so really thinking about that marketing to sales handoff and providing as much data, this is like that. And I think about silos, data silos are real. Your sales person is expected to have an incredible conversation, yet you're giving them three data points to go after while the marketing team is sitting on like a slew of data. So we need to make sure we're getting into the right person. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. If you think about this like PLG using product data piece a like there's just all this fascinating first party data, be like, that's right. Not actually getting in front of sellers in a way that that that makes it particularly helpful. This is actually something we're looking at a lot right now at at rippling. I'm curious. How do you think about the actual interface for this? In theory, it's like, okay, great, we have all this data like give it to sales and make it easy for sales to go action on, but then in practice, nobody that I've talked to has a great view of how do you actually make it easy and usable and you know, train it across hundreds of reps or even tens of reps. Yeah, I might be a little bit old school here. So I'm actually going to give you the three scenarios that that happen and we can talk about what we think which one is best. So I think people typically start with just a slack alert. So at a minimum, I've got playbooks. So not every signal, I don't want to send you every time somebody logs in. I want to send you a collection of, all right, we have three different people at three different departments logging in and using and yeah, they've just hooked up an API and it's telling me a story. And so we're looking for those kinds of moments and stories. V1 is typically sent to Slack and just kind of get that process going. A V2 will end up being a more custom solution. So the problem with Slack is I can't tell if you follow it up or not. I can't tell what the signals were. It turns into a bunch of noise. You'll get some initial adoption pretty quickly because the reps are excited. And then it's like, well, they care. It's the same thing with website tracking. We all get excited when we're like, so and so is on the website. And then it pretty quickly, we go, I don't really care that on the website. And really quick, when you say that it trails off, that's basically because it just becomes too many signals over time. Yeah, it's noisy. And I think unless you're super curated, I suppose if like it was one alert a day and, you know, is very curated, you probably would continue to get adoption. But I think what happens is we set it up like they are on the website and then it just becomes this gigantic Slack group of, you know, Noah was on GoNimbley.com. Yeah. Also, the website stuff half the time it's people looking for jobs and just kind of, but yeah. So I think that's kind of the V1 is like a Slack alert system. And it's capturing one of the core things, which is like alert your sales reps. Let them know given the information. And then you typically start to feel like, well, I don't know what's working. Did they follow up? And then you want to create a more scalable system. And then you start to get into, all right, let's go create an actual interface for this. And a lot of times it ends up in your CRF. There's schools of thought about whether or not that's a little bit old school. I still think that if your reps are working out of Salesforce and that's still the move, it's a pretty good place to do it. And we've typically built a custom object. That's kind of an alert system. I try not to call it lead. I'll call it like a go to market alert or something so that it's not confusing. And then I have child objects with the core signals. So maybe for rippling, maybe it's like 10% increase in employee new country. I don't know enough about your business, but I'm a customer. So I'm guessing, you know, these are some of the signals. So it looks like a lead almost with like a little related list of, here are all the signals and a recommended in text, what you should do next and little buttons that convert it to an opportunity or adds to a sequence or whatever the actions are. And what's nice about that record is I can tell if it got worked. And then I can also tell what the signals were. And I can start being like, okay, which signals are actually converting to opportunities in close one. Then I think there's the third category, which is tooling. There's companies like Pocus that are trying to own this like usage and alert system and work it. And then there's companies like GONG that I think are going to start to move on funnel and try to own this piece. And you know, whether or not sales versus the interface for sellers in the long term, I think is up for debate. Yeah, what's your view on that? I am not yet eating the dog food of the AICRM and the headless CRM piece. Mostly because, you know, it's really complex is coding. I think until we kind of nail a solution that doesn't have to be in Salesforce, that is a managing discounting and auto renewals and multi-year. I just I'm not seeing in the space. There's a company called Velis that I'm doing some advisory for that trying to only UI piece and it integrates with CPQ. So like I think it'll start to to the end, but until that piece is we still have to go in. And with AICRMs, they're cool. They're slick. They are a better UI, 100%. If I was going to start a small company, I would probably move it to an AICRM, one of these like creatios or adios, but they're not made market enterprise. They're not robust infrastructure integrations, security, the workflows are pretty basic. I mean, you can't replicate what like a Salesforce flow can do. And so I don't know. I again, maybe I'm old. I don't know. I hope I'm not. I want to be cool and young, but I'm feeling like there's still things that we can't replicate. Yeah, well, I think that there's like no doubt you want it all in one UI. Like I think that's probably not a particularly controversial view. And so then it's like, where is the UI? If you have a subset of things that are fundamentally important or required that still live in Salesforce, then it's like, okay, well, either you need two UIs or you need this other set of tools to do the fundamental things. I think coatings like a great example of something I haven't thought about. Yeah, I like to just give opposite takes. That's okay. I am a woman of multiple views. But the other thing that I found really interesting, I was talking to Ken Badpac to see a company called Tango. And they do automations within the browser. And I think that's kind of an interesting thing where we've been very focused on saying, okay, there's a big hype also about put all your automations in Slack for a while. I was like, put it where everybody lives and it's Slack. And then now it like gong is getting that when I start my career with Salesforce. So we have this obsession about one place. But there is a lot of investment. You'll see Elacian bot arc, the browser. Yeah. You have comment from complexity. And I'm like, okay, our sellers are going on LinkedIn and they are going in their email. And they're like as much as we try to give them one. Yeah, that's true. They're on site. They're not. And so is it that creating basically instead of a Salesforce flow, are we creating workflows within the browser that say, okay, you're in Salesforce and you're on an opportunity and you want to kick off the quoting process, click the workflow automation and it's going to start, you know, doing the workflow. But we're not doing it in the background because we want that human in the loop for like, all right, verify, click, like review, send. And it's just kind of doing the automation for you. I don't know. Maybe that changes. Yeah. Yeah. It just sort of makes me think sellers are 100% going into the email. They're 100% going on to LinkedIn. And so if there's something that's like equivalent or that runs in the background, then that is definitely sufficient. So there was one other thing you said in the second kind of part of your three step where it's like, okay, V1 is Slack, V2 is custom objects in Salesforce within 10 signals that allow you to immediately action on what's going on. How do you sort of think about like the prioritization there where it's like at Riveling, like we go up with like 50 signals, things that we think matter, like hopefully we have some data behind the ones that are actually successful or not, but it'll quickly snowballs. And then you're like, do you show account signals, do you show contact signals? I think there's a ton of nuance. Yeah. I think you do the right architecture. You could send an account or a contact. Frankly, it's typically both. Obviously, a contact has an account for me, but I don't really care if you send me, hey, go Nimbly is really active on Riveling. You got to go as a seller. We think it's these people, like you got to go do some work to figure out like who the buyer is and account mapping and whatever. So I think that infrastructure works both ways. But in terms of like what signals and what do we send? This is a little bit of an exercise where what's ideal? Ideal. If I had a little pyramid at the tippy top, we would have this AI first machine learning, yada, yada system that identifies people that are ready. And in some cases, some folks are doing some of that. But what I find is the first thing that we do is we go with intuition and talking to the sellers and they're going to give you some gold. They're going to tell you stuff you already know. I'm assuming for you all, it's like high employee growth and acquisition. So you're going to gather some of that and give the sellers what they're asking for, create that tight alignment, get some feedback. And I think that that's really important that you don't go with like the machine learning automated, et cetera, first, even though maybe it's correct, maybe it's not, but go listen to your sellers. And it's also it's a collection of signals. It's a story. It's something that turns into a playbook. So I'll give you a really great example of what Intercom did. And I wish I could take credit for this, but they knew their customers very well and they're smarter. But they came up with the idea of, and this is Lauren Silver. So I think at the time I'm on that team who is now she's moved on, but she's really incredible. And the idea was Intercom is a support platform and they track NPS scores for their customers. So what they looked at is imagine that your team is growing. So the number of support agents is growing. The number of tickets is growing. So like increased volume, which probably means like your business is doing well. Like you've got more people reaching out more customers. They seem a little mad, but like things that things are growing. And they also look for an NPS score that's decreasing. And so think about from a seller's perspective. And I have all those numbers. Do you want to talk? You might be like, no. But if I said, no, I was taking a look at your account. The volume of tickets increased by 25% last quarter. Your upwards of 6,000 a month. Congratulations. I can also see that your customers are feeling the pain of your success with an NPS score decreasing. Customers like you, well, I'll make it like deal. And, you know, Personio and I'll do competitors of yours. If I share, I'm going to take that meeting. You taught me stuff about my business. I didn't even know. I probably didn't have those numbers, you know, readily available. Maybe I didn't even know my NPS scores at decreasing. You're now an advisor to me. And for sure, I'm going to take that call. And that play worked really well. And so I think it's the difference of like, I could have sent you volume increased by 10%. That could have been the play. But instead, we're like collecting multiple signals and we're saying, hey, there's a moment in time. Is that kind of customer obsessed like really know where they're out? Why would they want to talk to you with the problem that we think they're facing and using data to do that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a great example. Like, go use all of the increased tickets, customer and yes, company growth to then feedback to the business. Hey, here's actually this dynamic that's going on that you can point social proof and all of that good stuff. This kind of ties into like a more system level question around who should be within a company responsible for driving these sorts of things. Maybe just as a quick level set. Like, how would you define what Rebops does in general or should be doing? Yeah. I'll metaphor first and then we can get into the specifics. The way I like to think about it is imagine if us as a company that go to market team and the Rebops team, all of us together, one one revenue team, we're trying to create a movie. And we want this to be the best, most incredible movie for our customers. We want them to have a really incredible time and experience. The actors are go to market team. They're the ones engaging with the customer. So those are your sellers and your CS team and your marketing team. We want to make them as prepared and it is wonderful and look in as beautiful as they possibly can. And so we're the ones in the background. We might be creating the script and being the directors, we might also be getting the food as much as people go, pay Rebops is a function that it shouldn't be a support function. I actually believe a portion of our work is to support the go to market team that still it still exists. And so we're basically setting them up. So we're in the background, try to do that. But I think the important bit is for sure there's tactical roles in making a movie. There's also directors and more strategic resources that help create that experience. And so that's that's kind of what I think is the MO of of a Rebops team. Okay, that makes sense. And then do you see that entirely focused on sellers, whereas like a marketing operations team is effectively doing like these similar set of activities for marketing? You have to have your definition of marketing operations. I do think that a lot of that function sits in Rebops and somebody with a focus on top of fun and understanding that being said, I believe in trying to give as much authority and ability to the marketers, they should now have to submit a ticket every time they want help deploying a campaign. Campaign operations that I've seen sit under marketing a fair amount because it is like tacked or repaid, etc. But the Rebops team might help you create the infrastructure to get the data that you need to do the segmentation in the right systems. And so there's there's components of it or I do see kind of lead handoff and lead rallying and scoring programs a lot of times sit with Rebops. It'll a little bit depend on, you know, what functions we think are going to ask and those teams because there is a trade-off. If you had a marketing ops rolling up to marketing, the marketers do get a lot more attention. And he has a marketing leader on like I know exactly recall and they're going to prioritize me and I don't have the fighting in sales. The problem that that creates, which is the whole premise of revenue operations is you have folks that are very focused on one part of the funnel and they're not thinking about what happens out stream. They're not thinking about, you know, having one data set similar metrics, tagging it. And so it's the same thing with when IT got centralized centralization comes with like some pains for the individual business leaders. Yeah, but but maybe I actually lead to the better overall outcome because these people are thinking more holistically or full funnel as opposed to like Rebops over here, focus on sales, marketing ops over there, focus on marketing, duplicate of work. So then you've seen probably hundreds or maybe even thousands of like Rebops teams. I don't know if I'm fat into thousands. I'll give you hundreds. At least hundreds like what do you think are like the differences between the highest performing ones that are kind of doing this like go harvest the customer data and signals and build the UIs and Salesforce for the, you know, for the reps, etc. versus the ones that that like lag behind. Really good question. When I, I'm going to talk about like the Rebops leader first because I do think that that individual sets a stage for the rest of the organization. When you're building a Rebops team, if you are understaffed, you are going to stay on the burning fire urgent issues. And you're going to be, you know, I think we've all been on a Rebops team that just feels like, well, I'm drowning and I'm just getting done what I'm being asked for. And there's no way for me to step up and be a strategic resource. And a lot of that work is why it's things like quotas and forecasting and and and I need a rapport and I can't log in in this validation rule and can you get me a quick field and it's just like this running the machine work, which is necessary and does exist. But if you actually staff your team appropriately and that does take a senior resource to look at it and there's no magic number. It's not like it's 10% of the number of sellers that you have. It's people will give you those benchmarks and maybe they're fine, but it should be a reflection of your roadmap. And so what are you trying to get done over the next year? And what's the team that you need to do that? Because if you told me things are going pretty good, we're going to grow by 10%, we just want to streamline a few things. That's one team. If you told me we're about to change our pricing and implement CPQ and I want to be AI first and I'm changing the SDR team to be full fun, whatever, then I got to go build a drastically different team to support that. And so a leader needs to put that out there and you wouldn't trust a product team without a roadmap, it's crazy how few revops teams have any sense of what they're getting done. Even in the next three months, it's not even asking for a year. And so I think that that's like one of the things that sets you up for success because you have the right people and the right staffing, the right skill sets to actually get good work done. Yeah, yeah, that makes complete sense. And then there's probably a vision of having at least like some level of intuition and strategy around what to go build, which comes from being close to customers, keeping in tune on what's going on. And then where do you think if at all that GTM engineering fits into this? Like do you believe in GTM engineers, do you think that it's this marketing push by Clay? I love that question. Do you believe in them? It's like Santa Claus. I believe Godfork engineers are real. Oh, I think they're real people. You know, I do think it's a brilliant marketing play. It's a brilliant strategy by Clay for sure. If you create a category, a type of role that is built on top of your job, fantastic. You've got a bunch of people that are fans of your product that are building their career on it in a partner motion. It's fabulous. I think that the term is kind of interesting because like most of them are not engineers. I do think they're highly technical and it's kind of the role that I played early in my career. I would consider myself somewhere that was very focused on automation and process and innovation and moving quickly. And I think that that's a valid type of role. I don't think it's an engineer. I think engineers would probably have said if you called yourself an engineer, not you, not you know, I'm not coming at you as a go-to-market engineer. You know, I've got a little bit of like torn feelings about the label. That being said, I think that tools like Clay and the go-to-market engineering mindset, which is almost bringing the growth marketing mindset to top of funnel primarily, I think is lovely. And you can apply it to expansions and whatever else. I do think that energy is really lovely and it's a perfect storm right now where we have better tooling where AI gives us a lot more ability to test things out and move quickly and be creative. And I also think that there's pressure to push the boundary and we're talking about getting sellers back to selling and the top of funnel is a heat paint point for lots of folks. So it's kind of the perfect storm. Now where go-to-market engineering and where they should sit and I'll also add like AI ops is like a new thing that's coming together. I'm biased for sure. I do believe that it is like core revenue operations and go-to-market engineers should sit within here and it's basically a they have a different focus area and a different ability. I also think all revenue operators need to get AI skill set and automation skill set because that's the era that we're in right now. And I frankly, I'm excited about it. I think it's cool. But the AI ops thing is really interesting because there are companies like Campbell has an AI ops team, open AI has an AI ops team. I was at an event yesterday and I asked that I was like I think two people out of 50 had it. So it's not super common. But it begs an interesting question which is we're building internal tooling as revenue operators. It's just very focused on go-to-market. And then you have this team called an AI ops team or you have this MO that's like top downwards and we have to go implement AI at the company level. Then revops isn't typically very good at rolling out product across an organization. You're not going to say revops, the engineering team wants to innovate and learn cursor and change the way that they build product and be AI first one out the right fit for that. And so it should probably be this different team. But now we have this sprawl where this AI ops team is thinking about efficiency at the company and it obviously your go-to-market team is probably a big part of that. You have revops doing the same thing and then it begs to be talked about is what's the role of product. I mean they're very good at building tooling and the other teams probably are not. And so what's the role of product and product teams they typically can't prioritize internal work but should they be given extra resources and it just feels like we're going to have a lot of double work, a lot of people problems to try to bring that together. I do think the outcome is the right thing that we're all focusing on. I think we do want to create more efficiency at the company and we do want to innovate internal tooling and again it's a time to build. But who does it and how? If you're a leader, a product leader, a revops leader, a I don't know just in operations like a AI ops leader, I think there's a lot of space, I call it space between lanes like everybody's got kind of their lane but there's going to be a lot of space between them and a really great leader is going to step up into the overarching kind of leadership of this case. Yeah, a lot of really good stuff in there. I want to recap a couple things. One thing you're saying is like GTM engineers, great marketing concept, are they really engineers in many cases? No, but that like a lot of that systems work should live in revops and if you want to call it a GTM engineer because it's more focused on the AI and systems and helping go to work it great like maybe good way to attract talent and signal that your business is focused on the right set of things then there's like how do you go apply this same framework across the entire business go to markets one area where like maybe a GTM engineer says but then you have like how can AI make engineers more effective and support and products etc and that part of the conversation is actually pretty intricately tied to this rarely talked about in the same vein and my guys at business you kind of have to figure out like should those be two separate people doing like different things should it be the same like probably in the same place makes more sense my question about you saying okay like GTM engineers should sit in revops is like I sort of have this like view where one of the kind of pros or reasons why like GTM engineers are becoming more of a thing is because the person who can own the metrics can also get closer and closer to the systems work and the person on to business outcomes and so for example like the person who's in charge of like the qualified demos coming from email or the person who's in charge of some organic traffic related thing actually then is getting closer and closer to the systems work because like the system stuff impacts the success because like it's easier for them to ship and launch things and so in that world do you just see it as like it should be split and like you should have the person owning the metric working with revops or that like there is a potential where it's like some hybrid you know I think the idea of being okay I'm an SDR manager I really understand the workflow deeply can I or some or hire somebody that is going to help me automate this kind of top of the funnel piece that I do not have to go through as centralized revenue operations team to get us I want to make a little callback it's not so different from what marketing has been dealing with the campaign operations and I made the point that like it's okay for that to go there as long as it's defined and the car rails are there and I don't know things like GDPR and double opt-in and in data and how it's flowing and that piece takes an architect and and it takes somebody that understands the full funnel so I would apply the same thing there and say could the strategy be that hey revops is going to build the infrastructure we're gonna get clased it up we're gonna integrate it we're gonna make sure that you're trained up on it etc and then there's this concept of like a waterline of like hey what am I allowed to do and not allowed to do and how do we lower that waterline so you're allowed to do as much as as you want that's the ethos that I've always had as an operator I want my go-to-market team I want folks to be able to be creative be able to test things out to be able to move quickly you know I don't want an SDR manager to come to me to test out a new sequence to be like I want to test out the subject line change like I don't want them after yeah yes I think we should be giving folks in different departments the ability to move quickly and innovate and I also feel like the core build and a lot of the infrastructure needs to be owned by either revops or at a large form a systems team needs to get involved yeah a small company series a like potentially actually could just have one person doing it like happily and so I think this is probably an obvious question to you and me in most senses but what makes you say you need like a systems team or these people who deeply understand the underlying tooling and systems that like are focused entirely on that as the companies get bigger yeah I mean that's the whole point is there's an inflection point in which your systems get complex enough and your requirements are complex enough and you're soft to complain and all this other stuff that you know companies can you know you ideally want to be really agile and as you get bigger you run the risk of becoming really brittle you know when we work with John one of my first customers when I went into consulting was GE it moved real slow innovation moved really slow because you're working with really complex systems and a ton of people so it's just a maturity curve of at some point things need to be centralized because security concerns and you can break things really quickly and things are more complex but if I'm walking into a 20 percent company and there's one revenue operator and we want to test things out frankly do it live do it in production you don't need a whole deployment process I don't need your set I don't need you know governance it's fine because you can always take it back yeah and so that it's just we work with mid-market enterprise level companies I'm coming with that view that is not to say that if you're a small nimble company that I want you to go set up revops and deployment processes and governance and whatever like you don't need it yeah build it live but don't tell anyone I said yeah yeah well one thing this is connecting for me that that I think is actually a very thoughtful way of putting it is it's like the system seems job to lower the bar or to make it easier for the teams who own the business metrics and outcomes to do the things that they want to do and then if you want to put like a person who's slightly more system-minded into the go-to-market function who owns the number and that person can get closer to the boundaries of what revops is created or vice versa you know it's like in some ways actually maybe you want somebody in both places like one person on the system side who's trusted not going to fuck things up and can actually build things for scale that's lowering the bar for entry and then someone on the on the growth side or marketing side that's like getting closer to the boundaries of hey why don't we have this thing yet like I need this automation I need this data point this is how I would do it you can go productionize it etc and that as those things kind of get closer then it's like okay people own the metrics can actually go impact the systems and the people who are building the systems can make sure that they're built to to last in scale yeah and anybody that's worked at a decently sized company has probably seen it in action the systems team for sure is going to guard things and and be worried but then they're going to create really great relationships and they're going to find somebody on the revops team that they trust that they have a really good relationship and they're going to do things like I trust you want to you build it in a sandbox and we'll take a look and they're going to start to give that person you know more and more authority because they trust them they understand the process etc but that does take not only skill set but it takes that that people side of business of creating trust and process and goodwill yeah and it's usually probably a different personality of the person who like is down to go build the thing that lasts and doesn't break and like versus the person who's like I just want to go hit the target and break shed and like I don't really care like you know what what I leave in my wake uh you know and we're going to take your admin rights away real quick if you talk like yeah exactly and yeah and it's like those are actually like different personality traits yeah and and the latter is maybe more fit for a mid-market company because as much as enterprise companies want to innovate like that it's just it's not the infrastructure that we have and you can create pockets of it like you can for sure like we said lower the bar in certain areas SDR operations is one of those things that like you can innovate on yeah yeah 100% yeah so so another thing that you've talked about a fair amount and I've seen you commenting on is just this broader system sprawl um going on and come to using all these different tools and go to market I'm curious a how you would explain that problem and probably more succinct way than I did and then be like why you think we're in this place now where there is this system sprawl just like the evolution you know you've been seen this and years play out totally okay I'm gonna start with a little level set on maybe the past five years and what's happened because I actually think it's it's kind of cultural weirdly so 2022 I know Ripley was part of this since I was working with Alex at the time there was a really big just fine mentality it was just like every tool under the sun was getting bought money was cheap it was way easier there was a mindset of like build it or buy it we don't want to have to manage it let's just buy every tool we all dealt with a bunch of tool blow and shelf wear and Revops was kind of underwater just like implementing me tool all the time just getting requests and frankly the job was kind of annoying it was like you know every sales leader was saying I need excellence in tool and then we hit a moment and I'm not joking when I say I didn't hear the word profitability I go nimbly up until like 2022 no customer had ever said it in the past eight years I just like I never heard that word and it was like that was all of a set in a focus and I think it's a good focus I think it means that operators have to be smart you need that pressure otherwise you just double the size of the SDR team otherwise you double the you know nurture campaign the calls or whatever if like it's just so cheap to do it you don't really care if your conversion rates are low if it doesn't matter of your profitable so we started to have a bit of a perfect storm there then you bring in AI and there's now a propensity to build I kind of like tease that a little earlier in this episode and I think it's really fun and I think it's exciting I do think it's an over correction I think we all are like culturally very excited to build our CFOs don't want to buy new tooling we've been hurt by a bunch of shelf wear and we're going to all start to build DIY stuff and then you know in the bar feels lower to build right like at least at least it feels lower lovable like yeah it's a prototype or to get a V1 out for sure to make it actually scalable is like I think where everybody's going to start to hit wall and so again really fun time to build but we're going to have I'm going to use use an example we're going to have a Noah problem or Noah you're awesome you're building lots of new stuff and you know revenue operators are terrible adopting anything maybe there's a loom video maybe there's a weird documentation and if you had to use a bunch of work around so like yeah it was a clay table but you had to use an innate end flow to create a slack group and then you know you put it in the flow in Salesforce because whatever and it's going to be tough when you go get another incredible job you'll never need rippling but maybe you do one day and then we're going to have this like Noah's size knowledge gap which is the whole reason why people like buy versus build because they're like I want a team that knows it I want to be able to escalate etc so I think we're gonna start to feel that in the coming years that we overbuilt I'll make a lot of money breaking that apart yeah it's not the work that I want to be doing but like it's an opportunity for folks that understand these systems they come in and lean up and go from like prototype and scale and then I think that there is democratization of automation which is cool lots of teams can build now lots of teams are building think about the GPTs every sales team created like 100 GPTs maybe some of them aren't used etc but we democratize this idea of building an automation which is very cool but what we're going to have is an issue where you're going to go into Salesforce and an account field is going to change and you're going to get a little ping and they're going to be like no why did it the account status change and you're like oh shit maybe it was a clay table maybe it's a slack automation and maybe exactly with Ricardo maybe you know I have no idea because what we're not doing is I don't see this we're not choosing a platform I'm not seeing folks being like hey everybody we're going to build a bunch of agents etc but we're going to double down on Zapier and that's like where we're all building it's department by department and like maybe one tool does it slightly better than the other we're like well whatever I want to do the tool that does it better as opposed to again if you're mid-marking above being like you know what I'm going to double down on this one place because I know it's going to be easier Amanda okay so so the way we got here is like five-ish years ago money was kind of like growing on trees nobody was thinking about profitability you know all these like bloated businesses and then you also this kind of like wave of new tools coming up and so businesses were like okay like let's just go buy a bunch of things and maybe ROI on this one tool be positive and then it's like across all these tools each individually siloed maybe as positive ROI but like combine creates this frankenstein you know of time we didn't actually implement it all the way we like half implemented yeah yeah and so then it's like all of a sudden barrel down the hatches we need to be profitable AI loveable glitches go build everything ourselves and so now we're kind of in this like place where there's a bunch of scatter tools and then like we're trying to pick up the pieces by building ourselves what do you think is like the broader fix to this I think that's for sure a move I'll put it into two categories I think one have this mindset of like we're going from prototype to scale so like maybe it's okay to democratize some build and some prototyping and everybody does it but at some point we go hey guys this is working we've got this piece of automation that we really love it's a little tape and duct tape and whatever let's go and and make it scalable and that might mean go build it in a Salesforce flow I don't know maybe it is like within a workflow automation to I don't know but like have that process of going how do we build this for scale and you know teach everybody that's the move and don't leave a bunch of half page prototypes so I think that's one mindset the other one is I think the best go-to-market engineers are going to understand and have depth more than one tool because this happened with Salesforce a long time ago but if you give someone a hammer everything's a nail it'll start to feel that way and not everything should be building clay even though you can it's extremely flexible but I don't know de-duping I don't want de-duping clay that's no use case like go build it with like a ringleader or do it inside of of Salesforce where it'll like feed into every other tool and so we need to make sure that we're not overextending ourselves somewhere and again the best go-to-market engineers will start to feel more like architects they'll start to understand the entire go-to-market tech stack they'll be in rub tech you know specialists and they will think about building actual systems and they'll obsess over data architecture and data models and order of operations and you know downstream effects like we've all probably logged into a clay instance and oh boy that's a hell of a lot of random tables that have been used once and so having that mindset of building for scale yeah so the mindset makes sense you think the actual like how to do that is is pretty straightforward for people to have the experience or do you think that like that in itself is something that people have to go figure out I think it is a very transferable skill from Robob's architects that we've had for a while or systems architects that we've had for solution architects have been living in this space for a long time because clay is a new you know tool but we've been dealing with it with warehouses and automation and sales automation this feels very akin to how many outreaches have you logged into and been like you have 30,000 seasons like what's going on here yeah there's duplicates everywhere and because like you know those things up they're powerful but then if you don't do the systems work for it they become a mess yeah so I think there's a lot of transferable skills that we've been building in our years for a long time but I do think folks that are starting out as just like I don't know I'm out of school and I'm doubling down on clay and I really understand it they don't have that experience to pull from so when we staff a clay implementation we add an architect to it and that architecture is not as amazing at clay as the clay art stories they're not going to know exactly how to you know make credits go far and and how to do great scraping and whatever other big ideas they're not even going to keep up with like every single feature they're going to think stability they're going to go okay how are we integrating it is this a bi-directional sync when do you update when do you not are you adhering to validation rules do you have an integration user they're adding that sort of insight yeah yeah I mean I've had this experience myself a rippling where I'm like like can we just use clay to build this like I know exactly how I would do it it would take me a day like right and then the pushback is like okay in three months you think it's going to live there at this level of scale and it's like oh probably not and so that that part makes sense as you're thinking about architecting a system that can kind of scale are there any kind of like constraints you try to apply or just like quick win tactical pieces of advice for example you know only use five tools or like only spend x dollars not as tactical as numbers but for sure this is also like another trend that that I mentioned the consolidation thing is very real and so we are going to try to build in the existing tools as much as possible people bringing in another entity just because it makes things easier to manage and adopt etc I think it's why gong is winning yeah even though like used to need clarity and outreach and gong and now they're all building each other's features you can bet on the course that you want yeah yeah on gong but the idea being I can only I only have to enable my reps on one tool there's only one in operation you know the adoption and the ability for me to get the most out of this tool is going to be better than a practical learn tools inside of so for sure like less is more yeah when and on that I think what maybe I'm curious if you agree with this like part of it is actually understanding like what the tools can accomplish and so it's like clay like you can actually think of clay as like an orchestration tool in a lot of ways and and like most people maybe don't and and it's like oh well like we only need one orchestration tool potentially right do really need clay in it and and cargo and right tape me or whatever it's like should probably pick one of like the tool that does this category of work and pick the one that like works for your business I think that's fair there's some reasons yeah big different for sure I think the guiding light is like please don't give me every single yeah and then I think there's a step back of simplicity if there's a simpler way to do it pushing back on requirements a really good example is lead assignment right when you go into a company and they give you a bunch of like lead assignment rules and it's going to be like if customer gets it partner this and if the SDR is on vacation route it to and like they're going to give you this like insane yeah and you're going to look at it and one of the things that we do is like okay great if we were to build exactly this where are the complexities what part of the requirements are going to create a beast a little like spaghetti monster that you're not going to want to manage so we push back on those so we say something like hey I know that you want customers that have been here for more than 10 years and have also I don't know come to our event to be routed to this person that like met them once but that's three people is that really something or sometimes will like hard code a thing to be like hey great why don't you have like a thing on the account that says always assigned to or something and we can like basically now build the into the logic of the lead routing and do something else that you know allows you to have more basically an manual override you know function that keeps my system really really clean whatever it's a dumb example but I think it's just yeah try not to build what you're being asked for right away and find the complexities and then push track and figure out if they're really that necessary yeah okay so fewer tools when possible and make sure you're not kind of trying to do duplicated things multiple tools and then second is like have very good reasons for why something actually has to be complex and and a lot of that is like actually looking at the like underlying business impact or or sort of volume of the thing that's going on and it's like do we really need to solve for this thing that happens like once a month you know or whatever I'll give one other like super tactical example but like CPQ when you go and implement a CPQ like discounting rules are a really great moment to be like why are you discounting in this like funky way that would make me have to go build a bunch of like complex price tools can we simplify or disrupt methodology without hurting the sales team half the time like sure will discount by percentage instead by I don't know buckets and so like I think having those conversations yeah yeah and then this is also why like raising revops to be more strategic you know and kind of lifting them up matters where it's like don't just take the requirements that you're getting but actually push back to understand what the needs are for the underlying system okay awesome what about trends in AI and go to market like are there things that you've been particularly excited about or think are going to be like become more important over time yeah I mean I've got something that's been on my mind since the like I'm points a little bit which is marketing automation is you know really weird space I just posted a video about this where I started off as an eloquent consultant I'm logged in eloquent and build you stuff right now and that was 15 years ago and so there hasn't been a lot of like more innovation in this pretty big part of our tech staff for a while you could argue HubSpot has had a lot of features and a lot of innovation I would argue Marquetto and HubSpot have not I'm sorry Marquetto and eloquent have not there's some new two toolings that are coming out but when I was at the clay conference clay released audiences say released email capabilities and they release signals and I'm like okay uh what what are we doing in in marketing automation now these other tools are doing it in a more flexible way I believe y'all ripped it out so like you guys were kind of a head of curve on like your marketing automation strategy I'd be curious to hear from you know but my take on this is like most people end up using marketing automation for form capture maybe a nurture and maybe it's working and then send the sales force and that's a very expensive piece of technology to basically route and send a couple of emails so I'm just kind of curious what happens to this because if clay and I did ask and I got a little I didn't get full confirmation but if clay builds out form capture so on your website just send right to clay what happens to marketing automation yeah I think it's really interesting one like all of the my general thought on this is like all of these system level work is for sure making its way into the other orchestration tools with like forms and routing and things like that yeah but then there's a separate question which like I think you have to figure out which is like how do you handle nurture streams effectively because like like that's actually I think like the biggest power of all these tools that like hasn't really been solved for another place is like onboarding send them down these routes and that's where like Marquette was really powerful and painful but powerful and there's sort of a question of like that part of it I think the rest of it like for sure I don't think you need a complicated like a hundred thousand dollar a year marketing software automation platform for yeah I think it's like nurture is in the same category as like quoting in Salesforce it's really hard to think about pulling that out there's other tools though I know braze is doing a lot it's a more of a b2c tool iterable and like you know there's little pop ups I know that John Mueller is building something I don't know what it is interesting I just think that I'm just curious to see because what I'm finding with marketing teams is everything was for a while built out of Marquette landing pages and forms and events and integrations with webinar platforms and now I'm seeing almost every event is running out of Luma okay marketers are not being like whatever this is easier and it is easier to text everybody and it's easier to message and the calendar ring is way easier so like now we're doing that and then I don't know if you've heard of SQL there a webinar platform but like folks are it's embedded onto your website so like folks can be like interacting with content while you have a webinar going and doing really well and then your newsletter do you put it in B hive or sub-stack instead of having a email that goes out because you can actually capture people and and get folks to subscribe to your newsletter much better than it's just like a clue on your website so I'm like okay we're now like taking away all this like functionality that was supposed to be this one-stop shop and we're we're going to like the individual tooling it's the bundling unbundling you know phenomenon but I am finding that folks are like whatever I just want to do these actions in these places and it also allows marketers to do things with like safeguards because those tools can only be full month and then bringing all that information right now it still goes into a marketing automation platform but what if it did it what if it just went into a work auto and you managed to send it to Salesforce and what is your marketing automation for you yeah yeah it's something really interesting to think about just on the topic of trends and creativity I have to just ask you like how is owning a it games company impacted your go-to-market work creativity and thinking first sure it it has what example is we do our you need to come to we do a conference in Berlin called Red Fest we did it last year at House of Yes I'm not I'm not telling me yet where the location okay it's also a nightclub and it's also in Bushway so nice folks can try to figure out where it is but I was inspired I've always wanted to run a conference and been a little bit nervous and I was inspired by all the game conferences that I go to we go to like packs and anybody who's sitting for example that's coming up in November and game conferences are fun and it still adults it's not kids it's adults that come there's boots there's activities to board playing games are meeting each other and there's just like this incredible energy at these conferences and I'm like okay why are our so stuck because it's like yeah you walk around you avoid the boots uh you know maybe you meet some people the talks are kind of boring and they're not curated so uh I took that experience and applied it and we put Red Fest that a game nightclub we had comedians on stage to make it feel like a show we also had free tattoos and tarot readings and all the test stuff but you can't be silly and fun if you don't also put incredible speakers on stage and so we also had really incredible operators from OpenAI and Intercom and Personio and really just had like really tactical incredible Robob's content but put it in a place where people could like relax and have fun and interact with stuff and especially if you're alone go make sure that there's like places to talk to people in Iraq so I definitely took that from games yeah no that's awesome well as we wrap I just like to ask everybody two questions uh the the first one is just like what what is your favorite underrated software tool oh that's so interesting okay I superhuman I don't know if it's underrated but I'm like just a big superhuman fan of it I was one of the early people that like actually had to get invited and all like it stops and uh I can't live without it it's uh it's my go to yeah is there anything you do in there that's maybe like and insanely helpful for productivity that isn't in the obvious set of like features I think all pretty obvious features but the stuff that I used really heavily is there's an ability to do comments in email threads so imagine you and I are in an email I can comment my assistant and be like hey can you help me send the calendar invite without having to loop her in and be like I'm adding ID to you know help me coordinate and so I can do that stuff sometimes in the background which can feel a little more curated yeah I'm like I'm having my assistant do it so I really like the commenting feature I can also see see someone if I imagine a customer you know the reaches out to me which is great but I want our delivery director to like no instead of having to ping them and screenshot the email I'll just add them to be like TJ snowflake is reached out I'm coordinating a dinner with them FYI and don't really like the common disease okay nice and then last question what what's your favorite growth hack or creative campaign that you've seen or run or been a part of okay this is not a growth hack this is a I'm gonna I'm gonna take your question and answer it in different way I think the cool stuff doesn't scale I think any kind of growth hack you have for sure you might have this like the beginning spike but if it's easy and it's a hack then others are gonna do it and so for me I've been really focused on for example we deploy to rev up several clubs and you have to know how you're invited but you have to be invited you have we have to know that you're a good hang and that you're a smart operator and that's the only way you get into to these dinners we do them at my house that's interesting kind of secret locations and we bring in a chef and it's a super curated experience and I make sure that like everybody at the table should meet each other unlike these are people that you should know you'll probably end up working for each other at some point yeah and it's that kind of stuff that doesn't scale that you know maybe it's not a hack because it's not quick but it has been integral and building you know a community of robots folks and of course I business comes from it for me but I can't scale it scale it I don't think right now beyond me because like the idea is like yeah hosting a dinner so maybe I can do two of us yeah no that's awesome cool well thanks so much for making the done this was really fun that's it for the pod thanks for making it until the end if you haven't already don't forget to hit follow on Spotify and or subscribe on substack in the show that's until next time