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.

★ Human-Centered Operations Leader, Instructional Design, Instructor, Author, Speaker, Education and Lifelong Learning Advocate. Dedicated to Advancing Women in Leadership ★

Short summary:
My work involves creating and delivering educational experiences to help people grow their careers and businesses using the lessons I learned from building an agency from the ground up as employee #1. I also create plans, processes, and programs such as a knowledge management program, an award-winning comprehensive employee onboarding program, and an award-winning referral partner program that generated 45% of company revenue. I am currently creating courses for Maven, Teachable, and HubSpot Academy. I am also writing a book on RevOps to combine a love of research, writing, and lifelong learning.


More context:
I spent several years learning executive leadership skills in my operations career at Remotish, a RevOps agency serving B2B SaaS companies using HubSpot, which also aligned with my purpose of advancing women in leadership (Remotish is women-owned-and-led).

I have very diverse career experience, which helps me see the big picture, quickly thinking many steps and scenarios ahead, while being detail-oriented. Creative problem-solving and clarity are my superpowers – I can generate surprising ideas with an unconventional perspective, and clearly explain the steps to make those ideas into reality. 

Career Journey: 
1. Graphic designer / art director, mostly magazines, with an art & journalism degree 
2. Photography piqued my interest while directing photoshoots, which led back to school 
3. Career 2 was a photographer and entrepreneur  
4. My favorite part of running the business was marketing, inspiring a career change
5. MBA in digital marketing to help my career move further and faster
6. Starting at Chief Martech Officer (Remotish) in a client-facing role that led to the fast track to management
7. Discovering part of what I was doing my whole career was Operations 
8. Creating educational content to help others learn these operations & career lessons faster than I did (internal training programs, on-demand and live cohort courses, templates, workbooks, and more)


Resources for finding your superpowers and purpose: 
1. howtofascinate.com (My advantages: prestige, innovation, and passion) 
2. 16personalities.com has an eerily accurate personality test (INTJ Architect) 
3. startwithwhy.com first helped me find “what” I enjoy: creating, improving, or discovering/exploring

Jen Bergren, MBA

This week's newsletter of learning resources is ready for you! 📨

Featuring content from:
Team Lab Podcast
Rachel Squire
Kathleen Booth
Jacki Leahy 🪄
Rosalyn Santa Elena
Mike Rizzo
Amy McClain
Chris Willis, MBA
Tom McDowall
Al Dea
Jeff Ignacio
Steph Reck
Genevieve Michaels
Lora Kratchounova
Akande Davis
Melissa Moody
Jen Allen-Knuth and ☁️ Cliff Simon
and more!

Read and subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/gxUAUd_p

#operations #ops #learning #learninganddevelopment #revops #strategy #communication #leadership #insights #crossfunctional #generalist

Jen Bergren, MBA, M.Ed.

Open article: Weekly newsletter #157 by jenbergren.substack.com

I began watching #MOpsApalooza recordings, starting with: Taking Mops to the Moon: A C-Suite Perspective, with Terri Avnaim, Carla Fitzgerald, Amy Holtzman, and moderated by Grant Johnson. 

Linkedin limits character count, so I’ll choose just a few questions.

How should CMOs coach marketing ops pros who want to take on more strategic roles?

Terri said to expose yourself as much as possible to the other areas of marketing. And always be asking the why behind the projects you're working on so you get more of the business-centric context.

Carla said to focus on ‘what problem are we trying to solve today?’ so leadership sees you as someone who helps get to the goal. Marketing ops has a tendency to think all problems are solved by technology. But consider a number of different capabilities as solutions, and the way all the components fit together cross functionally.

Amy said to think beyond marketing. Earlier in a career, we think about the impact we have ON marketing. But marketing fits into the much bigger picture of business strategy. Think about who is benefiting from this project? Why is the company doing this and how does my part fit in?


What’s the right balance between speed and structure in operations?

Amy said it depends on what the project and the ask is. Underlying infrastructure that deeply impacts the business has to be incredibly well thought out, and integrated with the bigger picture, and those things take time. Other projects we just need to get out the door, perfect isn’t required, it won’t have a bigger impact, so speed is more important.

Carla said it depends on the maturity and size of the organization, Early stage companies rely on speed because they are trying to establish themselves in the market. The larger and more mature orgs can’t scale, are spinning wheels if they don't focus on structure.

Terri said it depends on if it needs to be repeatable. Marketing ops rarely works on a one-and-done project, almost everything is a repeatable process, where structure needs to come before speed.


What challenges have you faced when trying to align marketing ops across departments?

Carla said what’s harder is getting what they do elevated at a strategic level so people can appreciate and understand how valuable that work is and not take it for granted.

Terri said a common tension point is with finance. Finance thinks if you can make it work in a spreadsheet, why can’t marketing make it work in the real world? She’s spending time educating finance about the length of the sales cycle because they think she’s spending this money in March and getting the opportunities in March.

Amy said it depends where marketing ops sits. Sometimes there is a need to align with marketing. Sometimes there is a greater need to align with other ops teams. Collaboration & sharing DOCUMENTATION 🎉 become really important. Legal can be hard to align with, since our industry and tools move faster than legal may understand.

Thank you all! #MOPZA25

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