the gtm engineer World Class RevOps Ownership, Execution & Tooling with Jen Igartua, CEO at Go Nimbly
Jen Igartua is the CEO and Co-Founder of Go Nimbly, a RevOps agency with 100 employees that works with companies like Intercom, Twilio, Zendesk, and Vanta. She started her career at Bluewolf, a major Salesforce partner later acquired by IBM. There, she developed an obsession with breaking down silos between sales and marketing after seeing firsthand how easily they become misaligned. That led her to start Go Nimbly, which now provides fractional RevOps services ranging from $20K/month engagements to six-figure enterprise contracts, plus a partnerships motion that has delivered over 600 Gong implementations in the past two years. What’s more, Jen also owns a board game company that recently got picked up by Walmart and Target.
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In this podcast, we discuss:
* The different stages of signal delivery systems and why most companies stall at stage one - Slack alerting
* Why RevOps teams need roadmaps and to build strategically instead of just fighting fires
* Why your first party product data is gold when building expansion and renewal plays
* What caused such widespread tool sprawl, the “build everything” overcorrection and the optimal state of GTM tooling
* Why the best GTM engineers will start to feel more like architects who obsess over data models and their downstream effects
* The swim lanes between RevOps, Growth, GTM Engineering, and system teams at varying company sizes
* What’s happening to marketing automation as tools like Clay absorb workflows like audience building and emailing capabilities
Episode highlights:
* Intercom used first-party product data to build an expansion play that combined ticket volume increases, support team growth, and declining NPS scores. Instead of generic outreach, reps could lead with specific information about a customer that they themselves might not even know.
* Jen explains that most companies start delivering product signals with Slack alerts, but adoption quickly trails off because it becomes noisy. A better long-term solution is building a custom object for signals in Salesforce. This enables teams to hone in on which signals actually convert into opportunities and prioritize accordingly.
* Understaffed RevOps teams get stuck putting out fires instead of doing strategic work. The fix isn’t to ignore the fires. It’s to staff the team well enough to handle the day-to-day while still building toward a longer term vision. This enables RevOps to be strategic thinkers with thoughtful roadmaps.
* Before 2022, there was a buying spree in tech that created tool bloat and shelf-ware. Now, there’s an overcorrection toward building everything in-house. Jen points out that while building in-house is great, it can create problems when the person who built it leaves or it’s not built for scale. Orgs are left with knowledge gaps and a bunch of half-documented workarounds across Clay, n8n, Salesforce flows, and Slack automations.
* Jen shared that most companies aren’t choosing a single orchestration platform for their automations. Instead they’re building department by department in whatever tool seems slightly better for that use case. This creates nightmares like trying to find which automation is driving which field changes and nobody knowing if it’s coming from Clay, Zapier, Workato, n8n, or somewhere else.
* The best GTM engineers will evolve into RevTech architects who understand the entire go-to-market stack, obsess over data architecture, and think about order of operations and downstream effects. Knowing when to use Clay versus Salesforce versus when to use a dedicated tool is one key that separates prototype builders from systems thinkers.
* Marketing automation platforms like Marketo and Eloqua haven’t meaningfully innovated in 15 years. Meanwhile, marketers are naturally unbundling. Events run through Luma, newsletters live in Beehive or Substack, webinars happen on Sequel. Now, Clay is absorbing audiences and email. If all that data can flow through an orchestration tool straight to Salesforce, the only thing left for expensive marketing automation platforms is nurture streams.
Where to find Jen:
Transcript details:
(00:00) Intro, Jen’s background, and founding Go Nimbly
(05:19) Go Nimbly’s business model
(06:16) Current trends in RevOps
(09:04) Using product signals for expansion and renewal plays
(11:48) The different stages of delivering signals to sellers
(15:15) AI CRMs vs. Salesforce for mid-market and enterprise
(16:50) Browser-based automation as an alternative to single pane of glass approaches
(18:21) Signal prioritization
(22:34) How to define RevOps
(25:26) What separates high-performing RevOps teams from the rest
(27:43) GTM engineering, AI Operations, and where they fit within GTM
(35:14) The importance of systems teams and governance at larger companies
(39:06) The evolution of tool sprawl
(44:12) The fix to GTM tooling sprawl
(45:36) How the best GTM engineers think like architects
(49:31) Pushing back on complex requests
(51:56) The GTM trends Jen is following, like marketing automation software
(56:12) How running a board game company influenced Jen’s thinking and her RevFest conference
(58:04) Jen’s favorite underrated tool, growth hack, and conclusion
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast and to recommend any guests, email noah@thegtmengineer.ai
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