Building smarter RevOps: A conversation with Jen Igartua

James Geyer: All right. It’s time for another episode of Boardroom RevOps, where we’re bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make it to the C-Suite. I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim. I’m the RevOps BI platform. I’m happy to be joined today by the inimitable, Jen Igartua. Ooh, great time, Jen.

Jen Igartua: That’s so nice. Happy to be here.

James Geyer: You probably know Jen is the CEO of Go Nimbly and the Mastermind behind RevFest. Jen, what else should folks know about you and or Go Nimbly.

Jen Igartua: Fun. Okay. I’m so glad you talked about RevFest. We’re feeling very proud about, uh, doing a RevOps conference at the house of Yes.

What else about me? Okay. I have a couple of shows that I do, I do This Week in SaaS. Where I cover a topic recently in the news. I try to be funny. Hopefully that comes through. And then I have another little show called RevOps Rants, where I’m actually kind of frustrated about this. Gen Z doesn’t know office space, the movie, but I built the office space, like the desk that Milton had, you know, with the Red stapler.

I built that. But I like took the care to, like the minutia I got, I was on eBay forever, getting like the fax machine and the whatever. And then I’ve shown a couple of young people and they’re like, oh, it’s a cubicle. And I’m like, no, it’s a very important cubicle. Um, so I’m doing that. I also make board games.

I actually have one. Yeah. What do I have one. So I made a game called Side Effects. I have a kid’s version called Hex Effects. We have a bunch of other games that just got picked up at Walmart. Wow. So that’s a little side hustle. Uh, and then I live in Brooklyn. I grew up in Spain. Uh, I think that’s, I think that’s everything.

I think I’ve given you my entire bio.

James Geyer: I love it. Many layers. I do have to know a bit of a digression, you know, what’s your advice on making a board game? What’s the, the creative process there?

Jen Igartua: Yeah. Uh, you have to play test like crazy. Make sure it’s fun. I know that seems so silly, but people launch games all the time that are just like, not fun.

Make sure you play it a bunch and that people have fun playing it. And then the easiest thing is Kickstarter, you know, spend some money on making a great video. And we just wanted to make a game. I didn’t realize we would make a company. We just did a Kickstarter. We had a goal of 12 grand for our game side effects.

We ended up at like $80,000. And all of a sudden we were like, I guess we make games now and it’s gone really well. So last year we did over half a million in sales and so it’s like a decent business.

James Geyer: You’re, uh, creating a conglomerate here. I don’t know if there’s synergy between RevOps consulting, uh, and board games,

Jen Igartua: So I am so bad at the board game business. Like we, uh, the first time we made a game, um, the factory was like upselling me and they were like, do you wanna add thicker cards for like 3 cents? I was like, 3 cents. Yes. Do you want gold foil for 50 cents? I’m like, uh, a hundred percent. Like, just, yeah, like, do you wanna magnet on the box for a dollar?

I’m like, that sounds cheap. And by the end of making it, they told us it was the most expensive card game they had ever made. And I was like, I’m just not used to talking in cents. I need to reel it in. So we remade it, did a retail version, and now we’re making money.

James Geyer: Funny. I love it. Well, I wanna dive deeper into all of that at a later date, but today we’re talking go to market tech, go to market systems.

So Go Nimbly does a lot of great systems build work. Uh, I think you’d have as good a perspective on kind of the market as anyone. I, I’m curious, like really broad question to kick off here, but like, what’s the state of the sales intelligence kind of vendor landscape right now?

Jen Igartua: Yeah, totally. I wanna anchor the conversation and say we work with mostly mid-market to enterprise level companies and so, you know, I don’t necessarily think the tech stack is always applies.

I think when you are a young series a company, you can test out a lot of young tools. You can, you know, kind of integrate it, adoption’s not that hard, it the same, you know, you don’t think about the same things when you’re trying to build a scalable go-to-market system. And the way I think about building it as a revenue operator is we’re essentially building a product.

It’s just that our product is built on top of Salesforce and HubSpot and whatever else. And so it’s really important to think about, you know, who your users are, how big that team is. So when I’m talking about a mid-market to enterprise level company, I might have hundreds of users. And I think on the, uh, sales intelligence, it’s funny, since we talked about doing this topic, it has changed.

A Salesloft and Clari are now one, I’m trying to coin the term Cloft for them. I think that would be a really good company name.

James Geyer: I don’t know if they love that.

Jen Igartua: Hey, they haven’t said Alia. I’m gonna email, I’m gonna email their marketing team and say, no, no.

James Geyer: Cease and desist. Yeah, yeah.

Jen Igartua: Free, free of charge if you want Cloft, it’s yours.

And you know, that does change things a little bit, but I don’t think in the direction, Salesloft and Clari thought. So, you know, if we, if we take a step back, we’ve had five years ago you needed outreach. You needed, uh, Clari for forecasting. You needed Gong for conversation intelligence and you were using all three.

I think there’s a really big trend right now, kind of in general in consolidation. You’re seeing all these platforms build each other’s tools. The, you know, Gong building forecast and engage is like a perfect example of that. You can also look at Chili Piper, Chili Piper’s building routing, and they’re taking over LeanData, right?

And so like they’re all sort of building each other’s and LeanData got like a calendaring tool. And so you’re seeing it in a bunch of different spaces, and I think that comes from a craving. From operators to just have less tools. I think, uh, we got very buy happy in like 2020, 2021 when money was flowing and we bought every tool under the sun.

We barely implemented it. And I think all of us are realizing like, oh, okay, I need to make sure that it’s adopted. I need to make sure that, you know, teams are using it. Which I think is why a platform like Gong is winning right now. Less integrations, less adoption. It’s like one tool. And frankly, they’re investing so much where a year ago I would’ve said.

Good enough. Now I’m like, okay, we’re here. Their sequencing tool is good, their forecasting tool is good. We can scale with it. And so, you know, I think that the SalesLoft Clari announcement, it’s kind of, it was kind of their only move if we were playing chess. You know, it’s not quite a checkmate, but they were like, okay, we gotta join forces.

Mm-hmm. It does tell you that they’re kind of admitting that, you know, Clari had tried to build, or they bought Groove, right. For. Sequencing and I guess they’re saying not good enough. And then SalesLoft was, you know, building out a forecast product. They had built it out and I guess they’re saying, alright, scratch that, we’re coming together.

James Geyer: Easier to just buy the customers or grab the customers as is and kind of go from there perhaps.

Jen Igartua: I think so. But I was looking on LinkedIn and stuff. They have like, they’ve had no growth. So I think, you know, I’m curious to see how customers respond to it, but, you know, people are not excited when PE owns the, you know, platform you’re using.

James Geyer: I was gonna say, yeah, I totally agree with everything you’re saying about moving from like the ZIRP-era. Budgets are lower, but it also kind of feels like the market as a whole is just kind of saturating and maturing as well, and is a kind of a natural, like mature company evolution almost from like an investor perspective too.

So. Um, expand to other markets while, you know, our existing market is kind of saturated. Yeah. So it sounds like, I’m curious if you have a perspective on this. I know it’s, it’s early-ish in this transition. You made the point that operators are kind of tired of integrating everything. Partially, it’s not going super well.

As you’ve seen people move to consolidated platforms, like are things going a lot better? You say like, good enough, all the products are better. Like, what are the outcomes you’re seeing versus like 2021, 2022?

Jen Igartua: No, I think it’s better. It’s less shelfware, it’s kind of lower tech budget. So bottom line wise, it’s good.

And then it’s way less things like integration errors, half used platforms, you know, things not integrated all the way. And so I think the win, the promise is there. Consolidation is good for everybody. I think that, uh, the, the other tidbit that I talk about a lot when I’m looking at these trends is we have this part of our tech stack that’s being consolidated.

I’d say like the big boys are getting consolidated, right? Like the, the core platforms. And then on the other side, we have a lot of promise of building your own tech and we are going back to building. I’m seeing operations teams getting much more technical and that is a pendulum that’s been swinging. I would say again, five years ago, we were just doing everything declarative.

We actually at Go Nimbly had a hard time staffing engineers. We had engineers on the bench, we were asking them to basically do point and click, like build flows and, and build automations. And frankly, they’re too expensive for that. But that’s what we had to do. ’cause our customers didn’t wanna build in code.

I think we had gotten just, there was a trend saying, no, everything has to be declarative. You can, you have to be able to see it. And then now I think, you know, obviously the promise of ai, all these new tools, this workflow automation, I think we’re all getting this, this obsession with automating manual tasks.

And that means that a lot of people are building, you know, on top of, I would say the old school or like the, the, the products that have been around for a while are your Zapier and your Workato. And you know, they are stable and they are good and they have lots of integrations. And then you’ve got your hot, new tools like your n8n and your Make’s and even Clay that are also fueling this, I don’t know, excitement around.

Building again. Mm-hmm. And you know, that is sort of the rise of the go-to-market engineer as well in, in that space. Ultimately. I’m excited. I really love building. I think it’s fun to build point solutions. On the other hand, it’s, you know, who’s managing these? What happens when the guy who built left it?

What happens when you’ve built in every single one of these tools? So now in Salesforce I have an account status changing and I don’t know who did it because we used up all the integration users. All of a sudden I just see account status changed by integration user three. And I don’t know if that’s a Slack bot or a Clay table or a Zapier or Workato or fill in the blank.

So that’s the one thing that I’m like, alright, I wanna build, you know, custom to, to our customers. I also need to think about how do we make sure that it doesn’t bite us.

James Geyer: Yeah, I’m so curious about that. Like, I guess first of all, would love to hear your opinion on. How much are you actually seeing these things deployed in real life?

I’ll say like everyone sees like the LinkedIn thought leaders. Yeah. With the 40 step, solve all your problems, you know, outsource your entire BDR team. With this one flow, it’s hard to understand like what’s actually being put into production and successful. Like are there use cases or examples you see that work well?

Jen Igartua: Yeah, I actually have, so, not to the level of people’s, I don’t know, uh, here’s this template that helped me build a $5 million business overnight. I’m not seeing that. I’m not saying it’s not true, but I’m saying that’s not, that’s not what we’re seeing in the mid-market and the enterprise. What we are seeing is marketing is adopting AI the most.

So they’re the ones that, you know, a lot of content creation and research and all that kind of stuff, and, and they’re the highest adopters, CS the least adopters as you can imagine. And the interesting thing is like the bread and butter use cases, they’re not anything you’re not expecting. So I don’t know.

Take sales, for example, account research that’s working, get a button inside of your Salesforce that even can push into Slack that right before your meeting does the research on the person and the company, and gives you insight into have they ever been a customer. What’s going on in the news? What should we know about their industry?

Why did they reach out? Have they engaged with our marketing in a way that is like really easy to digest? That’s sort of a really powerful part of ai, I think, is consolidating information and giving it to you in a very easy to read way. We’re seeing, uh, a lot of like handoff automation in a really great way.

So think about SDR to AE handoffs or, you know, AE to CSM after it’s closed-won, and making sure that, again, all that information is easy to digest, which is helping the customer not have to repeat themselves, you know, over and over. Which is, I think a quintessential like silo syndrome scenario that everybody talks about is.

As a customer, I don’t wanna repeat myself. So I think we’re, we’re fixing that. And then I’ve got, uh, I’m like, I don’t have logo, right? So I’ll just say we work with some like very big AI companies that you guys all know and love and they’re doing very cool stuff. Also in CS also, we work with Intercom who has Fin, which is an AI kinda CS support ticket manager.

And, and it automatically closes tickets for you and, you know, working with these really innovative companies they are. Seeing a lot of results and being able to automate the easy support tickets.

James Geyer: Mm-hmm.

Jen Igartua: And being able to route effectively also

James Geyer: knowledge base. Yeah, answering and things like that too, that are well defined.

Jen Igartua: Yeah. Inbound is also an area where we’re seeing a lot of ability to automate. So when somebody comes into a Contact us form, actually being able to see, okay, is this supposed to actually go to support? Is this real? Are they qualified? And then routing accordingly. We no longer have to have, you know, very robust programs for that.

And I’ll kind of tack on, you know, one more. So that’s on, on inbound, but we’re also on outbound. We are automating emails. I know that that seems scary and nobody wants AI to automate emails, but if you automate the first touch in an actual thoughtful way, we have a customer of ours that doubled their reply rate by automating their emails.

So taking it away from the SDRs because turns out they write very lengthy, bad emails sometimes, and the AI that we’ve built really just goes, hi, you know, I saw this about you, thought it’d be relevant. Here’s a relevant case study. Would you like to meet? Jen, and then sometimes PS and something kind of personal, like I saw you on Podcast X.

James Geyer: Mm-hmm.

Jen Igartua: But short and sweet and curated, that’s working too. And so we are seeing in pockets now, what we’re not seeing is, okay, we have now a headless CRM on top of a bunch of unstructured data, and the AI has been running loose and it’s like fixing our business. I’m not seeing that LinkedIn post, uh, in reality.

James Geyer: What is your, that’s so interesting, um, and I wanna come back to some of those use cases as well, but what is your take on like the headless CRM? Like, I, I hate to be like a bit of a Luddite, but it’s hard for me to kind of imagine that and, and maybe I just can’t see far enough into the future, but to me it feels like process data quality, all the foundational things that you as a business have to define myself.

And like a lot of the promises of the headless CRM in my opinion are shoving a tool at a problem that’s more foundational. I don’t know if you agree or if you have a take on kind of where that CRM market goes.

Jen Igartua: I agree it’s not here yet. I agree that it is still important for companies to focus on their data architecture, consistently tracking things like I need to start and end date, and products consistent on every opportunity.

I think it’s, that’s still all really important. That said, I do think we’re gonna get to a place where, I mean, if you think about how, what AI can do with the internet, like it can go search the internet and bring you back answers. And that’s unstructured data and that’s data that tells different stories and that’s opposite data.

And so I do think we’re gonna get to a point where, and in some, in some cases we already have, you can put a little chat bot on top of your data, ask it questions and get pretty good. Uh, so I think. We’ll get to a place where we don’t need to structure it as much. I don’t think we’ll ever get to a place where we don’t have to track who are our customers, what did they buy, when do they have to be billed, like all of that.

I still think for no other reason than SOC 2 compliance, like we need to have that really consistent in the right architecture. Opportunity. Infrastructure is a thing that I talk about all, like every single customer. If they don’t have it, that’s one of the first things that I, you know, talk through. So I don’t think it goes away completely.

I do think that there’s a world where, um, we can let the AI loose. And I, if you’re listening to this on audio, I put that in quotes and be able to get insights from it, especially on a one-to-one. Like I’m just talking to it and saying, Hey, do I, what happened with this account? I think it can, uh, and we’ll get there.

James Geyer: Yeah, I think that makes total sense. But to summarize though, what I’m hearing from you, a lot of AI use cases right now as one would expect based on the developments in the LLMs is really around unstructured data research, getting a little bit more context.

Jen Igartua: Mm-hmm. I think context and, and giving reps data at their fingertips is one of the most useful use cases of ai and one of the easiest, it’s not expensive to spin that up.

James Geyer: What do you think? I, I’m also curious, like I am looking ahead into the future and it doesn’t mean I’m necessarily good at predicting the future, but I’m wondering if, you know, people get, companies get better at using LLMs web scrapers to get these data points. Mm-hmm. Does this just start to look again, like, you know, two years ago with ZoomInfo where everyone has access to the same data and like all of this value goes away?

Jen Igartua: Yeah, a hundred percent.

James Geyer: We’re just always on the treadmill of, you know, always needing to be ahead of the masses before a channel gets spammed.

Jen Igartua: Yeah. Which is why you should do it right now, because people are seeing impact from new tactics. You know, I think this is the messaging that Clay’s really pushing this idea of go to market Alpha, which is like, for me, I just kind of call it, you need a growth marketing mindset.

When it comes to sales and marketing and growth marketers, were always testing, I’m gonna change this button, I’m gonna try this offer, I’m gonna, you know, move this, you know, call to action over here. And they’re, you know, attempting to get people to. Basically convert to free trials faster all the time.

That’s the same kind of thing that we need to do in outbound, for example, try different offers, try different subject lines, try different research, try different signals and see what works. Because I don’t know, 10 years ago when you emailed me, Hey Jen, I saw you went to UNC Go Tar Heels. I was like, they know me.

You send that to me, I’m automatically deleting. Yeah. So that’s gonna happen again. Um, but. I do think it’s a competitive advantage right now because companies take a long time to make change. So if you’re one of the people that can move quickly, do it.

James Geyer: Yeah. Um, to kind of round out this topic, maintenance and tracking, you kind of kicked off by talking about integration user three.

How do I know, you know, what the heck just changed this account status? Any advice on how folks should be thinking about this? Or, or maybe the better question is like, with that in mind, what advice do you give folks before they dive into some of this, like, go-to-market engineering or automated?

Jen Igartua: So 100% your entire team should just be playing right now.

Like get yourself a playground. The, you know, you need AI literacy amongst your team to do anything cool and to have any cool ideas. You kind of have to know what’s available to you. So I don’t want, you know, this fear of building, you know, point solutions to stop people from trying to build. But after you’re done playing in whatever tool you’ve decided on, I think a great director of RevOps is going to choose their tech stack.

It’s going to choose like primarily one workflow automation tool to say, Hey, we’re going to live here. Whether it’s, hey, we use Salesforce flows for things that are like inside of Salesforce and mostly Salesforce. We’re just gonna keep it here. We’re not gonna pull the data to push it back in. And then maybe you’re gonna find one workflow automation tool.

Don’t. Really care what it is. I have some preferences. Zapier doesn’t get like a lot of the hot and exciting things, but they have security. They have like 8,000 integrations. Like there’s a world where like that’s, you know, the one you do. I also like Workato. Uh, it’s a good integrator between it, it can manage massive amounts of data.

So I think they’re really fabulous. I really like Clay for enrichment and for, uh, doing things like one-off. I think it’s very good at that. The account research piece, it’s very good at. Um, and so I think you need to choose and n8n. I’m less hot on, I think it’s very cool and very fun, but I just worry about the security piece and that they’re early.

So I don’t know. You have to choose your tech stack and, and make sure, I don’t think it’s a documentation thing. Everybody sort of like pushes the documentation. I’ve built enough flow diagrams to know that it gets old really quickly. Um, I think that you should log what your outcome was. I think that you should log your, you have a change log that says, alright, we built x, y, Z automation.

This is when it was built. Here’s a document as to why, and here’s where you can find it. But I don’t need you documenting the steps because I’ll, I’m always gonna just open it.

James Geyer: Yeah, makes sense. Okay, great. We’re almost at time here. I, I’m curious, uh, and maybe to even, to go back to the beginning, just wanna make sure I’m clear.

Platform consolidation. Do you think there’s a winner there? Is it, can you. Is it, you can’t go wrong. I know. I think you’re a Gong fan. If memory serves like is is Gong gonna win? And, and why?

Jen Igartua: I mean, I think they’re already winning, so I’ve definitely hitched my wagon to Gong. I think they’re the horse that’s winning in this race and I think.

I did a lot of research when I was sort of making that decision of who do I wanna like really partner with? And, and some of our customers have other tools by the way, like we work with all of them. It’s not that I don’t think that you could be successful in Outreach or SalesLoft or anything else, but the reason why, if I was implementing today or making a switch today, I would pick Gong is ’cause they have the biggest like engineering chops and, and the most innovation there.

Because it is one platform, they didn’t go buy a bunch of different ones. And because if you look at the innovation they’ve had one year ago to today, like the amount of features that they rolled out, and I’m also, I’m not sure if it’s announced yet, but you know, whatever. They’re also building like orchestration layer so that you can do some automation within Gong based on Gong data.

And I’m like, great, this is something I can build an entire kind of go to market business on. And sellers really like Gong. Yeah. And so when your users like it, it’s just like a hell of a lot easier to kind of adopt. So that’s why I’m betting on Gong. And frankly, I don’t know, like, man, I am a gambler and it’s like I cannot imagine being at the casino and you know, having to put a thousand dollars down on Gong’s, SalesLoft, Clary or Outreach and not picking Gong.

Like I just don’t, I don’t know what else I would pick. Yeah, I think the last bucket is like new. It’s like, okay, great. There’s lots of new tools that are encroaching on all of them. We’re watching that space, but I don’t have anything that’s a platform yet.

James Geyer: Yeah. It’s hard to imagine a, a new platform like replacing like a Gong right now, just based on, you know, how far along they are.

But I guess people have said that in the past about other platforms as well.

Jen Igartua: Totally. So, yeah, you gotta keep innovating.

James Geyer: The orchestration layer inside is really interesting too. We hear like in our sales processes for AccountAim, like so many people want to just take more action on their Gong data. And so to the extent they’re building something else out to do that, that’ll be pretty exciting to see.

Jen Igartua: Yeah. And I know we’re, I know we’re wrapping up, but one of the things I would say, Gong plus Clay is really powerful. Put it, getting all of your Gong data in Snowflake, especially if you have a strong data team, also really powerful. And then, yeah, I think what, what. I’m hoping Orchestrate does. We don’t, we don’t know it yet.

It’s not released. But from what I’ve seen, just being able to do some of the kind of, okay, the deal has just closed, give me a summary of every call and what’s been happening so I can hand that over to a CEO and having that as an automated workflow, because you mostly wanna give them things from calls when you’re handing off SDR to AE or AE to CSM, what you wanna tell them is, here’s what we talked about.

Here’s what they care about, here’s what we committed to. So I’m very excited about that.

James Geyer: Yeah, that’ll be cool to see. Uh, last question here for you, Jen, take everything we talked about today, how should we think about this impacting the average tech company? I don’t know, series B, C, D, um, you know, what’s, what’s gonna happen to RevOps in these functions few years from now.

Jen Igartua: Yeah. If I think, you know, I’m gonna take your question a little bit and more, say what happens to this role? Like who is going to, like, you have to capitalize on this. If I’m an operator, I’m going, okay, there’s a lot of change. There’s new technology, there’s the promise of ai. At the same time, execs care about RevOps.

Now you’re seeing, like VCs recommend RevOps. Way earlier. You’re seeing data from Forrester and Gartner saying that companies with RevOps perform better than without on the public. Market. And so this is kind of, it would tell me as an operator, like, okay, this is kind of my golden age. Like everybody’s paying attention to me.

The world is changing. And for a long time, RevOps meant shit we’re doubling the size of our sales team. We need to go update, you know, our tech stack and our rules. That’s not what they’re asking us. Now they’re asking like, Hey, this is a machine. Where are the biggest bottlenecks? Where do we need to change?

Where are we behind? I’ve said this, it’s a, it’s a cheesy way of saying it, but like RevOps has been training for this. We’ve been wanting to be operators. We’ve been wanting to do the interesting work. We just haven’t been given the chance. And I think right now is when companies are listening to this team.

And if you are somebody that is truly not just an operator, but someone that’s strategic and be good at storytelling, you can get a promotion right now. This is like a time when you can, when you can have that big role.

James Geyer: Amazing. I think it’s a perfect place to cap it. Very inspiring. Jen, thanks so much for hopping on and spending some time with me today.

It was really great chatting with you.

Jen Igartua: Thanks James.