Jen Igartua’s love for revops was born from an all too familiar frustration: the sales vs. marketing divide! 

She soon realized that this problem - and revops in general - is as much to do about people alignment as it is about tools. And so in 2016, Go Nimbly was born with a mission to create ‘frictionless, human buying experiences”.

Jen chatted with us about her journey to enlightenment in revops, what motivates her, and her vision of more “human-led” selling.

Don’t miss out on Jen’s engaging LinkedIn content, especially her “This Week in SaaS” series!

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1. You had a background in marketing automation before moving into revenue operations. Could you tell me a little about journey to where you are now?

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So I started off my career at a company called Bluewolf. I was actually the first hire to build out the Bluewolf marketing automation team right at the hype of all the automation tools, so I got really into things like Eloqua, Marketo, and HubSpot.

The turning point for me realizing very quickly that anything I did top of funnel was affecting the sales team, was affecting other applications. That got me really obsessed with a couple of things:

One, why are these two teams that are so seemingly aligned having so much friction?

And two, why are we mad at each other?

So I spent a few of years in my career doing a ton of sales and marketing alignment work. A lot of this was around the people side; how do we get these two teams to align on the right metrics? How do we break down these people siloes? How do we share information? How do we align nomenclature and speak in the same way? 

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2. How did Go Nimbly come about?

Something I’ve realized is that humans are very good at aligning vertically. We don't typically see misalignment with your boss or within your team. We see it across teams because it's not natural for us to work in a group of 50. We like our little smaller teams.

So I figured we can solve the people stuff. But we still really have to invest in technology and in integrating tools, making sure they're speaking to each other with data that’s structured the right way. 

You get into this place where you have data silos, technology silos, and people silos. And that was really the impetus of creating Go Nimbly. 

Our tagline before there was revenue operations was “unifying the business stack”. And at the heart of that was the belief that technology was a way to get everybody looking at the same data.

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3. How have people’s perceptions of revops changed since you started out?

I think we've actually got past the “trough of disillusionment” with business operations. We've been talking about revenue operations for almost 10 years ago, but I believe we were the first company to call ourselves a revops company. 

When we started out the industry needed to know what revops was, then we moved into, why, why it needs to exist. And I think now we're seeing more and more thinking tactically about it.

But there are a couple of interesting things here. I think leadership has taken a more active role in implementing revops. It’s coming top-down, and that wasn't always case. Five or ten years ago, it was bottom-up. 

And also from a messaging perspective, we’re getting the point across. We talked about what the strategic impact that revenue operations could make for organizations. Well, they believe us now, and their expectations are really high! 

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4. So what misconceptions do you run into about revops? Or do people have unrealistic expectations about what’s deliverable?

It’s so cliché, but it's about the team journey: forming, storming, norming, and performing. There is no skipping stages, and so there is no instant payoff where revops suddenly delivers strategic value. 

The forming is really exciting and you feel like the sky's the limit.

And then we go through storming; some people are going to leave and things are going to feel bad. If you're starting a team, you have to expect that and take time to form and create your norms before you create your high-performing team.

And the other thing is I think there’s sometimes too much emphasis put on org charts. We spend all this time looking at team structure and don’t spend enough thinking about how the team actually works. 

For instance, some of the best-performing revenue operations teams I’ve seen are structured in ways that we’d think of as wrong - with distinct sales, marketing, and customer success siloes - but they have incredibly effective practices and culture. They’re ruthless in prioritization. They identify gaps and solve gaps instead of projects, and that’s where culture is so important in good decision-making.

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5. How do you go about evaluating a client’s needs and strategizing a solution when they come to you at Go Nimbly?

One of the first things that we do is we have what we call a “Silo No More” workshop, which is all about getting the right people in the room to talk about the customer journey.

It's really important for us to understand their business, but we find afterwards that the client will often say, “Wow! We haven't had a meeting like that where we're all aligning and talking about the same thing.” Or someone from marketing goes, “Oh, I didn't really realize that was a problem in adoption. We can help by creating the right content.” 

It's that silo-breaking and that empathy that kick-starts the whole process.

When it comes to solving particular issues, we’ll help them figure out what to prioritize and what to expect. For instance we’ll ask, “is this a good experience for the customer? Is there a peak experience here? Is there pain, but also, is it worth solving that pain? Or is it too expensive to solve that pain?”

And then the other thing we do is we do rep rides, where we sit with key people from the go-to-market team. Not just sales! We’ll sit with them to learn everything. These are like therapy sessions, and believe me, they'll talk a lot! So we'll do that tactic. 

And then there are always tech and reporting audits to help identify major operational gaps.

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6. You’ve touched on how teams learning to work effectively beyond the org chart; how do you encourage them to manage change in their operational processes?

Nobody likes change, so there’s always a bit of friction there. But the main thing is to reassure people that nobody's got this figured out! Nobody has a perfect tech stack. Nobody's nailing it on all fronts, especially if you're a high-growth company. 

Even the companies you look up to and think of as being really innovative actually have pretty basic processes.

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7. What are the golden moments for you when it comes to working at Go Nimbly?

We've definitely taken gut punches through Covid, the great resignation, and the general tech slump. 

So I've focused on things that I can to bring me joy, and one of the things is I really pride myself on running a business where my employees are treated like adults. I don't see myself and my team as a family. We’re a high-performing team: there's respect, there are norms, and there are expectations, but we really show up for each other.

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8. And if you had a magic wand, what would you fix about your work or the revenue industry more broadly?

Putting myself in a revenue operator seat, if I could just fix data quality, that would be awesome! It sucks. It's tedious and it's expensive. 

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9. Another thing you’ve posted about is how companies should build to allow for “human-led movement”. Could you elaborate a little on that concept?

Everyone thought that PLG (Product-Led Growth) was the only way to run a business. Even Slack tried to do without salespeople, and now they've got a really big sales team. The problem with this is you end up with two funnels within your organization: your self-serve and your Sales Led funnel.

But the truth of the matter is, as a Buyer, I don't really know that I'm in a funnel. I want to go back and forth. Sometimes I want to talk to sales; sometimes I want to go via the products. We should allow that to be a lot more fluid.

So then it begs the question of, how do we look at all of our customers and work to identify when they need a human-led moment? Do they need to have a conversation to get to their “aha” moment, or get unstuck, or whatever?

And so we've built a lot of these human-led frameworks with our customers, and they’ve been really effective. It’s basic marketing: “right person, right messaging, right timing”.

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10. So how do you see AI complementing your human-led approaches?

I’ve learned a lot from Alina Vandenberghe on this subject. As she’s said, let’s stop automating the actual message to our customers. Let's stop trying to automate the conversations and let's automate everything else so that that person can have a human-led moment.

Remember when BDRs and SDRs were actually out trying to connect with the industry, and were real industry analysts? They were booking meetings for sure, but not by spamming everybody and playing a numbers game. They were developing their relationships.

I'm hopeful that that's the shift we're making, a bit like selling was back to the 80s. More person-to-person. We’re doing a disservice to our reps by treating them as very expensive button pushers. 

They want to be elevated, too, and they want to have more interesting conversations. We can have more M-shaped generalists with three areas of depth, whether it’s in product, technical, or industry-related, and that will make reps more senior.

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11. We’re loving your “This Week in SaaS” video series on LinkedIn. How did that come about?

I actually started off recording a podcast, but I felt like everybody else is doing the same thing! I wanted to do something kind of different and more creative. My boyfriend's a comedian, so I'm surrounded by a lot of comedians, and I decided to record one and give it a shot. 

And I really enjoyed it! I enjoyed performing, writing the jokes, and also making myself smarter. I get to research something a little more in depth that I'm kinda curious about. And from a go-to-market strategy perspective, I want my customers know to know that I know SaaS deeply because that's the industry we're looking after. So it's been really fun!

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12. Finally, how would you explain revops to a 5-year-old?

Okay, you know how movies are made. There are the actors and and the experience that you get. They're creating this this amazing experience for you to watch this amazing movie.

But in the background there's tons of work being done. There are script writers, props people, set people, acting coaches. There are directors shaping the experience. 

And all those people in the background, you don't see in the movie. But they're making the movie happen. They're making that really amazing experience for you as the audience. We're doing that for companies to create peak experiences for their customers.

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Be sure to follow Jen on LinkedIn for more revops insights!

‍If you're looking for more revops inspiration, check out our list of 20 must-follow revops leaders.