Today we're joined by Jen Igartua, a RevOps leader and 10+ year operations consultant.
We discuss her vision of the go-to-market engine as a product, how to ensure the work of RevOps is aligned with C-level priorities, and the importance of focus for enabling deep work.
Jen shares some awesome knowledge here for how RevOps teams can achieve greater impact and how operators can level-up their careers.
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About Today's Guest
Jen Igartua is CEO of Go Nimbly, a revenue operations consultancy for scaling businesses.
From Jen's LinkedIn: "I’m...working with high-growth companies to create a frictionless, human buying experience with RevOps."
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-igartua/
Key Topics
- [00:00] - Introduction
- [01:02] - Jen’s consulting background. How she helped start Go Nimbly.
- [02:37] - Definition of RevOps. Metaphor of a business as a film studio, where the goal is to make a movie, GTM teams are actors, and RevOps is the director.
- [03:56] - How operators can step into this director role. If you’re mid-to-junior level and in a company that doesn’t get RevOps, you likely won’t make a huge impact and need to find another environment. Or it may be more a matter of you needing to improve your skills. These include the ability to say no, having an intake process, and keeping priorities aligned to the C-level.
- [07:31] - Whether operators have a self-limiting mindset, focused on their craft vs. business impact. Growth mindset is important. A lot of this is new and people are still figuring it out.
- [08:34] - RevOps as a product and whether the “customer” is the GTM teams or the literal external customer. Jen’s point of view is that we need to understand what RevOps truly brings to the business and to the things the CEO cares about. Sometimes that may be solving for customer needs, but in other times it could be something different (e.g., data readiness in preparation for an IPO). Ultimately we achieve our customer-facing goals via the GTM teams, so we need to care about their experience and happiness.
- [14:52] - How Go Nimbly interacts with the different GTM teams. Whether RevOps is just sales ops rebranded. How silos form and evolve in companies. People are good at aligning vertically but poor at aligning horizontally.
- [18:13] - People align themselves based on how power and authority flows in an organization. If the CMO and CRO aren’t aligned, their teams won’t be either. Justin’s experience on the importance of having a unifying force, like a COO, to bring them into alignment. Jen thinks this is ideal, although not something every company has. Ultimately a company is like a complex system. All systems have weaknesses, and so we need to mitigate those weaknesses somehow.
- [20:22] - Gap-first thinking: how to identify initiatives with the biggest impact. Start with the business gap vs. with ideas in a backlog. When you have your goal, then identify what levers you can pull to reach it. Typically these levers include “3VC” - volume, velocity, value, and conversion. You can identify where your weaknesses are via reporting or through durability testing (aka stress testing). Go ahead and become the customer.
- [24:32] - Why gap-first thinking is...
