Scaling GTM Ops for B2B SaaS Startups ⚙️🛠️

As a Marketing and Revenue Operations Consultant with over 10+ years of experience, I help the top startups & Fortune 500 Companies grow their revenue through operational excellence 🚀💸

My Background & Experience: 
★ Scaled operations at 10+ Companies that were growing at 100% Year over Year 📈
★ Over 30+ certifications in Marketing & Revenue Sales Technology 🏆
★ Launched 10+ PLG & Freemium Efforts 🚀
★ Scaled 100+ Salesforce Instances 🛠️ ☁️
★ Scaled 100+ Hubspot Instances ⚙️
★ Optimized 75+ Marketing & Revenue Analytics & Attribution Tools 🛠️
★ Managed Millions of Dollars in MarTech Spend
★ Sales/Marketer Turned Ops Engineer  💸

My Portfolio: 
★Samsung / Samsung NEXT
★Connectwise
★AT&T
★WPP
★Madkudu
★15Five
★Lever
★Aerolase
★Madison Square Garden
★ControlCase
★Auvik
★Ramp
★Productiv
★John Varvatos
★ and many more.....

My Beliefs: 
★Ops Teams need more bandwidth via On-Demand Technical Talent #ExtraBandwidth
★Business Teams need solutions that make technical things easy
★Repeatable & Scalable Lead Generation is achievable
★Marketing & Revenue Operations can be strategic but requires a holistic approach to the business 
★Work can be and should be Fun! 

Outside of work, I am: 
★ Most importantly, a Family Man 👨‍👩‍👦
★ Diehard Knicks & Giants fan🏀🏈
★ Foodie 🍕🍔
★ Lover of nature 🌴
★ Sneakerhead 👟
★ Health Fanatic 💪🏽
★ Real Estate Investor 🏡

For more information on how my expertise can help your company grow, please visit www.JayOh.io.

Joe LaGrutta, MBA

When I see a company hire more salespeople instead of fixing their sales process, I already know what the next 6 months will look like.

We had a client do this last quarter. Great product, healthy market, but their pipeline looked like a Jenga tower — wobbly, unpredictable, and one bad month from collapse.

Their CRO’s solution?
“Let’s add four more reps.”

Cool. Except here’s what we found in the audit:
	•	37% of opps were missing required fields critical to forecasting
	•	Lead handoff time had crept from 18 minutes → 7.3 hours
	•	No one trusted the stages, so reps created their own “shadow pipeline”
	•	Marketing had no idea which channels were actually converting

Adding bodies wasn’t going to fix that. It was going to multiply it.

So here’s what we did instead:

1️⃣ Cleaned the lifecycle — mapped reality, not wishful thinking.
2️⃣ Rebuilt the stage definitions — reps finally had guardrails.
3️⃣ Cut lead routing time by 84% — which alone gave them ~22% more at-bats.
4️⃣ Stood up a simple attribution model — suddenly budget decisions made sense.

The wild part?
They hit their quarterly target before the new reps even finished onboarding.

I’m not anti-hiring. I’m anti-hiring-your-way-out-of-avoidable-chaos.
At JayOh - the GTM Engineering Company , we see this across almost every $10M–$50M GTM org:

Headcount isn’t the problem. Friction is.

If you want the RevOps Leak Finder we use in these audits, DM me “Leak Finder”

Fractional RevOps & GTM Teams (and Memes) ⚙️🛠️

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Most teams don’t have a budget issue — they have a visibility issue.

When money gets tight, everyone panics because nobody actually knows which channels are pulling their weight.
So everything looks “important.”
Everything feels “strategic.”
And everything becomes impossible to cut.

It forces you to answer the only question that matters:

“What’s actually driving revenue, and what’s just burning calories?”

Every time we build or review attribution models for clients, three truths show up immediately:

1️⃣ 20–40% of the budget is doing nothing
2️⃣ A few channels are doing all the heavy lifting
3️⃣ Teams wildly underestimate the compounding value of brand + paid working together

Once you see that, budget cuts stop feeling like torture.
They feel like an optimization problem.

Tight budgets don’t kill marketing.
Flying blind does.

The teams that win the year?
They’re the ones who can prove — with math, not vibes — what happens when you reduce spend, shift mix, or scale one lever over another.

Budgets shrink.
Impact doesn’t have to.

The fastest way for a CMO to get fired?

– Big spend
– Lots of MQLs
– No one can explain why revenue is flat

It’s almost never the channel that’s the core problem.
It’s that:
– lead routing is broken
– stage definitions are vibes-based
– CRM data is a war zone

We call the fix a Marketing Ops Engine.

First, we make your reporting bulletproof.
Then we go back and scale what actually works.

Enrichment credit budgets crack me up.

Teams will spend $7 worth of credits researching someone who typed “asdfasdf” into a demo form…
and then wonder why they run out halfway through the quarter.

Most teams don’t have a credit problem — they have an enrichment strategy problem.

They enrich everything.
Every form fill.
Every webinar attendee.
Every inbox gremlin with a pulse.

Basic enrichment should be automatic.
Deep enrichment should be conditional.

Yes — enrich most leads.
Email, name, company, HQ, firmographics… that’s table stakes.

But the expensive stuff —
tech stack
intent layers
AI agent lookups
multi-source cross-checking
deep persona profiling —

That should only happen after the lead proves it deserves the investment.

The hardest weeks aren’t the ones where things go wrong —
they’re the ones where everything technically works…
but nothing scales the way you expected.

One new customer breaks the process.
One new hire exposes the cracks.
One new tool creates five new problems.
And suddenly “simple” becomes “why is everything on fire?”

Here’s the truth nobody tells founders:

Scaling isn’t adding more.
Scaling is removing the stuff that collapses under pressure.

It’s tightening the workflow.
Cleaning the data.
Fixing the UI.
Unclogging the bottlenecks.
And building systems that don’t scream when you add volume.

If your week feels “difficult difficult lemon difficult,” congratulations —
you’re not failing.
You’re hitting the exact moment where a startup stops being a hustle…
and starts needing actual systems.

And that’s where the real work begins.

Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations | Martech Leader | Speaker

Author and speaker. Co-host of the Humans of Martech Podcast.

Subscribe to the Marketing Operations Leader newsletter for MOPs strategies and insights every week: https://darrellalfonso.substack.com/

Highlights: 
- Ranked as one of the Top Marketers in the US by Propolis 2022
- Named one of the "Top Martech Marketers to Follow" 2020 by Martech Alliance 
- Keynote speaker for Martech Conference and Get Stacked B2B Marketing Conference 2021
- Awarded Fearless Marketer 2018 
- Marketo Champion 2018 and 2019 
- VP of Communications American Marketing Association - 2017-2019
- Marketo User Group Leader 2017-2019
- Leading Program Manager for Connect@Amazon (35,000 member Amazon organization)
- Frequent Martech Speaker and Author 
- Marketo and Salesforce Certified 

Posts are my own and do not reflect the views of my current or former employers.

Darrell Alfonso

I’ve joined Impellam Group as Marketing Operations Leader!

Not every role works out the way you expect. What matters is finding the right place to do meaningful work with the right people.

Excited for what’s ahead and for the opportunity to build with this team.

Marketing Ops Town Hall is this week! 

"What the best marketing ops team do in January" 

Hear from experts like Mike Rizzo Audrey Harze ✨ Dr. Agness Mnena Gaadi, MBA, DBA AJ Navarro Michael Hartmann on how you can get a great start for the year. 

Sign up for free, link in the comments! 

#marketing #martech #marketingoperations

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