Philipp Stelzer: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab Podcast. Name is Philip, and I'm here together with Janus. Hello, Janus.

Janis Zech: Hey. How's it going?

Philipp Stelzer: And also a big hello to Lindsay Roethlisberger. Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Hi. It's really great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Philipp Stelzer: Yes. Great to have you. Lindsay, for the audience, for those who don't know you from LinkedIn or elsewhere, what do you do?

Lindsay Roethlisberger: I lead the revenue operations function at Zapier. I've been there for six years. My background spans marketing, demand gen, marketing ops initially. And at Zapier, I was actually the first marketing ops hire and built the marketing ops function and then scaled that out to RevOps as we started to expand our market motions at Zapier.

Philipp Stelzer: Alright. That's great. That's also like a very broad range of topics that you're owning by now.

Janis Zech: Yeah. It's always interesting, like, these different paths where revenue operations, you know, people working in revenue operations are coming from, like in your case, marketing, sometimes it's finance, sometimes it's more like the product direction. Did you work in marketing operations before joining Zapier? Was that sort of like your initial career path?

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yeah. Yeah. I did. So I've worked at really large enterprises like Oracle where I primarily did demand gen, and then marketing ops at some smaller companies and startups where we're really building the foundations for go to market from zero to one. So a wide range of experiences there. And at Zapier, just to help to give context, our charter for revenue operations spans both the PLG and the sales led funnels and is across marketing, sales, customer success, as well as revenue enablement. And we are responsible for the tools and the tech systems work as well as automation and AI, so lead management, deal management, sort of facilitating the customer journey, as well as insights analytics, comp, deal desk, and all of the sales ops areas as well. So it's quite a broad charter at Zapier, but it's been a really, really great experience in building it out.

Philipp Stelzer: That's really great and super interesting also, I mean, particularly sales enablement, but really that you have that concentrated, I would say, like, strategic and operational power within the revenue operations team. Before we go into the topic of today's episode, just curious, was that, like, something that organically evolved over time? Or, like, when was that decision made to really make that RevOps team so broad in terms of their focus topics?

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yeah. Great question. I think it has to do with the business model at Zapier. Because we were product led for so long. We have this really huge broad base of users and that large amount of data and it has pretty heavy system and data requirements. And because a lot of our sales led motion and our growth into larger enterprises has been facilitated or driven by that product led go to market, it requires just really tight coordination across RevOps. So it's like as soon as a lead comes in, how are we treating it? Whether it's really high touch or high velocity so that routing becomes really important really quickly, how are we qualifying leads, pathing them, and then how that translates into the sales process. It just has to be so connected, that kind of like PLG SLG combination of a model. So I think that's why organically it made sense to have this all in one function so we can just be really tightly coordinated and make that customer journey pretty seamless.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And you mentioned, like, initially Zapier was very B2C focused. I think we met actually in San Diego at RevOps AF, and I think you mentioned something around building up the B2B motion back then. Is that was that roughly the point where all that started?

Lindsay Roethlisberger: It was just a few years ago, we started experimenting with a sales assist motion, so humans in the loop. And now we have a high velocity sales assist motion running alongside an enterprise motion and a mid market motion. So we sort of started there and then layered on the different growth motions over the last few years, but RevOps has been really crucial to building all of the mechanisms to power that.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Love it. Love it.

Philipp Stelzer: Lindsay, we're here today to talk with you about a topic that might be near and dear to the heart of many listeners. You made a post about, I think, a month ago on LinkedIn that started with "RevOps is changing."

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Oh, thanks for this one.

Philipp Stelzer: Not dead. That's what it's not. Yeah. That would be the typical — no. No. No. I think it's good. It was not too clickbaity, but I think it was good because it focused on a tension that many feel in the RevOps space. Do you wanna walk us through what that post was about and why you posted it?

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yeah. So all my posts are really genuine and just echoing experiences and tensions that I'm feeling as the RevOps leader in my role. One of the things that's been really hard for us is, as I mentioned, we were growing these motions from pretty much zero for the last couple of years. And we've got a solid foundation, but we're working toward more system reliability, precision in our data, enabling more self-service so teams aren't as reliant on us for insights and things. So it's a lot of — we're still building foundations for scale, for repeatability, predictability, which is a really important thing that RevOps leaders need to be focused on because that's what informs the business and informs go to market. But we're also struggling with this tension where it's really competitive in go to market right now, and there are new software solutions scaling up every day because of AI. And so you have to be really good at GTM to win, like, right message, right time, reach the right customers, figure out what's working in terms of messaging and demand gen, and then scale it out really quickly. And balancing those two things has been really difficult for us. There's always been this RevOps tension between reactive work versus strategic project work and where we've always had to balance that. But this is almost like a new tension that I think we're feeling because go to market is changing in the way that we do marketing and sales. Like the speed, the number of experiments or opportunities that are out there are wide, but also outbound is hard and you have to get good at it and you have to practice and have hypotheses and prove things out. And we weren't really set up to balance the tension of those two competing needs that are equally important. So I really wanted to just see if other people were feeling this, like how are you evolving your teams? And we're really restructuring our team and how we work to be able to move really quickly on new opportunities and also build those foundations for precision and scale.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think especially with Zapier having such a, I would say, complex go to market system, right, with a PLG and then multiple segments, multiple geos, it just creates a lot of complexity. So I assume you could just stay on that and just try to build for perfection and you would have pretty much like endless work to do. So like, what have you changed to adapt to that new reality? Like, what specifically have you put in place? And maybe it's a team structure, maybe it's people, maybe it's mindset, probably it's all of it, but yeah, I'm super curious how you react to that.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yeah, great question. I think the other element to add to that is it's not just the different go to market motions, but it's also that Zapier is a horizontal product. Like, we serve multiple personas and verticals and industries. So that's another challenge too in terms of like how we're setting up our sales teams for success so that they're not constantly context switching. In terms of what we've changed for our team itself is we've started to focus the team and assign members of the team to focus on a very specific part of the funnel versus a specific part of the process. So what that means for us is we had a few folks in marketing ops and they had some shared responsibilities. There's lead management workflows, there's campaign design. We have someone focused on email infrastructure and architecture. And what we've decided to do instead is to sort of cut across those different things and have folks focus on a very specific part of the funnel or a very specific part of the foundation. So sort of like, I would say it's a different kind of specialization, meaning we have someone who is obsessing over the inbound funnel. So she previously might have done that, but then also launched or designed campaigns and also sort of kept an eye on foundational things like lead management and qualification. But by doing this, we've been able to have somebody feel true ownership over a part of the funnel that powers growth. So she works in more of a pod with our marketing counterparts where they're figuring out campaigns and experiments together to increase the performance of our inbound funnel. And then we have a specific focus on our outbound funnel, and that's where we're currently defining the GTM engineering focus to begin with. I wanna call out that I think GTM engineers can be applied across all of go to market. I think outbound is a really interesting place to start because it's very, very closely connected to revenue and new paths for generating revenue. So we're focusing our GTM engineering efforts there on the outbound funnel itself. Luckily, my team have a lot of folks who have skill sets that I think are similar to a GTM engineer, meaning pretty technically proficient with systems, pretty good at weighing business value. And I think it's important on any RevOps team to have that technical skill set, but then also the business acumen to say, this is something we should test versus this is something we should just do. And so I would say the folks I have focused on the inbound funnel, you could probably call them GTM engineers. They're using AI solutions for qualification and things like that. But I think where GTM engineering has really grown in being a successful element of RevOps or go to market in general is the fact that they are really good at the enrichment elements, at figuring out intent signals. And that's, I would say, a little bit different than what we see on the inbound funnel in terms of how we work. So that's an example of how we're sort of restructuring the team to lend itself to the changing GTM environment.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I'd love to double click a bit on that. So, obviously, there's been a huge debate last year whether RevOps should be renamed to go to market engineering. I think the way you describe it is it's just part of RevOps. Right? And I would fully agree with that. I think it's been a weird debate, to be honest. It's a bit like, okay, let's call RevOps now go to market ops. I mean, it's basically just, okay, why do we need a new name for something that actually makes sense? And in my mind, most companies don't really live it — similar to a CRO role. Right? That is often, you know, on paper a CRO role, but maybe not actually in reality. So okay. So the go to market engineering role, you're looking at — let's say it's currently focused on outbound because I think that term was firstly coined by Clay, right? Like basically creating a new way of combining signals and signal orchestration with enrichment and campaigning. Right? So I think that modern outbound playbook has become, I think, dominant, and this is the way to go. That's for sure. What I'm super curious about is like, where does it start and where does it end? Right? So like, is go to market engineering the role that basically orchestrates the whole thing, but then you still have SDR leaders that work with them and lead the team? Or would the go to market engineer actually lead the team or also have input on messaging? Where does it start? Where does it end? And I think that to me is super interesting. Curious what do you think.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about this. Here's sort of the division of roles and responsibilities and how we're thinking about this today. This might change as we learn. So I think the value that the GTM engineer brings to the table is the technical and systems expertise first and foremost. I envision the GTM engineer being the one to do the orchestration of audience, data, message. Where we're planning to rely on BDRs and actual people is validating some of the more human elements of outbound. So messaging, the offers, the content. We're using the GTM engineer to do the systems work. And once we start to see some signal of what's working on the messaging, the offer, the content, the engineer would help scale that out, build agents to make it more efficient. So it's gotta be this really collaborative relationship in my mind. The other thing that we're doing is we're pairing our GTM engineer directly with marketers. So we have a marketer working very closely with the GTM engineer to help define audiences, what are the new potential strategies or pitches or offers we might wanna try. I think that there's a world in which some people in GTM engineering are really strong at both of those things, and that's great. I think it kinda depends on the makeup of the team and what's really proven and what you know works and what is pretty new and nascent. And you sort of need a little bit of a pod to be able to figure some of that out with different skill sets and specializations. So sort of like the relationship that we're thinking about today. In my mind, I don't like the idea that you have to be reliant on an engineer to do outbound campaigns. Why is it that hard? It shouldn't be that hard. So I think ideally, these GTM engineers can build systems that are self-servable by marketers or BDRs to be able to run these programs in a more autonomous way, but yet coordinated with guardrails. I think that would be my ideal state. But we're starting small with like, let's build the mechanisms and agents to test some of these different experiments and just learn initially what works.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I mean, like, with the titles — just on the engineering piece. Right? I mean, it is an invention. Maybe even someone at Clay invented it. It wouldn't surprise me. And it's a smart move, I think, to call it the GTM engineer. It gives you a lot more credibility just from the naming convention. Not like — this isn't a dig at anyone who's calling themselves a GTM engineer. That's not my goal. Right? But I think you have these trends, like a growth hacker. Right? Like, that was when I was in my fifth year professionally. Right? Like, the growth hackers were everywhere suddenly, like, growth hacking agencies and so on that had the best marketing tricks. But it wasn't hacking. Right? Like, after maybe one or two weeks into the trend of that new title coming up, I think all the growth hacks that you could do were already more or less public. And there wasn't so much new innovation. It was just really being really good at executing, putting the system together, understanding the formula, the mechanics behind it, and just being savvy, but also confident about it. And I think that's, to me, what GTM engineering is also, right? I think it's like, okay, there's someone who's a little bit tech savvy, is not afraid of trying out a new tool, plugging it in, putting it together, maybe using Zapier even to do that, right? And then bring it all together so growth can be accelerated in a way that maybe a year or two years ago wasn't possible on that level. And maybe you needed like five people for that. And now you can do it with one person. Right? And I mean, that's basically it.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yeah. I totally agree with you. I think that's so interesting. I think a lot of folks in RevOps were kinda like, wait a second. We've been doing that.

Janis Zech: Exactly. Exactly.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: We've been building. I know we have a function in RevOps that we called virtual SDR, and we were automating the booking of meetings and the outreach. But I think when you have it — it is really smart marketing because GTM engineering implies, like, I'm an expert. I know how to do this. And I think a lot of people right now are trying to figure out how to make outbound work really well. So it's just super timely.

Janis Zech: Exactly. I think the way I would — I think when we think of outbound, what has changed so tremendously is that it's actually all signal based. So I think the signals play such a big role these days. I think that has always been true, but in 2015, very few companies were really leveraging signals at scale. I think in 2025, if you don't use signals, it's gonna be very hard to make outbound work. And then I think there's just a shift of the predictable revenue model not being economically viable anymore. So everybody's like, okay, great. Wait, inbound is really hard. Outbound is kind of — I mean, two years ago it was like that on LinkedIn. And this is just, I think it's all wrong. Right? It's all well in life, but it has changed. And the change is combining the signals in a way. And then I think there's a renaissance in calling, at least what I'm hearing. Right? So because that's very hard to do with AI. And so many companies see a lot of success in calling, so you have to basically use the signal orchestration from the marketing ops or go to market engineering side and combine that with essentially a calling motion. I'm not sure if that's so relevant for Zapier given the inbound funnel, but I think that's quite interesting. Right? Because you're basically calling people that already know you and that are just in a different awareness stage in the funnel. And I think that's really the big change, and I think this has been a big unlock for many companies. But right now, the tooling is not plug and play. Or it's becoming plug and play, but it's not yet plug and play. So this is kind of a transition period where you need these technical skill sets to be able to orchestrate it. But I think it's a huge opportunity for RevOps from my point of view.

Philipp Stelzer: And I mean, I don't know if you know this, but we're a Gong competitor at a better price for Salesforce customers. And I think that Clay is the first company that has brought that together on the outbound side. I think when you think of the sales ops side, right, there could be revenue engineering that takes all the signals, combines them with amazing data quality, and then creates AI workflows that basically orchestrate the whole thing. The reality is that's something that nobody has built yet. So we're building that, and I think that's super exciting. But the reality is AI really hit the market on the tooling application layer side two years ago, two and a half years ago. So I think there's a lot of things that have not yet been built that are very exciting to witness. And you see similar things with routing tools and things like that. Right? So I think there's a lot of building right now that will enable RevOps to become more strategic orchestration, basically defining where everybody else spends their time, which is a lot of cost you're basically orchestrating.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Exactly. Yeah. And we just have so much more access to data, so it's not spammy anymore. Like, we can actually make pretty good stuff.

Janis Zech: Well, I think that's the other thing with AI that's so interesting. It's like, if you stop at outbound, like, you're not doing it right. You know? Like, GTM engineering focused only on outbound, I don't think is the right mindset because we're seeing so much value in unstructured data from call transcripts, from chats with customers, and you can make use of that throughout the entire customer journey. And so that's another thing I wanted to highlight.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I love that. That's top of mind for us internally. For sure. Because not because our processes are broken, but as Janis mentioned, right, we also do call recordings and just build systems to automatically go through all transcripts of the last week and look for the key objections. And you can do the same with email. You can do the same with calling and just the basic power of an LLM to go through a vast amount of text and just condense it down, right, is basically the beauty of it. Right? And then you get insights — like, we had one customer in advertising and we found, hey, actually the biggest objection is not their price or whatever, like typical objections, like authority, like path to power, stuff like this. But it was actually just budget management, like how their accounting team dealt with advertising budgets. And that's obviously a huge insight for them because that's something they can fix. And that's like for renewals, basically existing customers working on accounts, massive. So yeah, I fully agree. Like, I mean, whether you call it GTM engineering or whatever. Right? Like, I mean, in the end, what I like from what you said is basically the pod structure and giving people — okay, you own that part of the process. And like, we give you — that's what I read from your post, basically. Right? Like, it's basically just say, hey, let's experiment. You're allowed to move fast. You're allowed to create tech debt. You're allowed to break things. Right? There needs to be obviously an outcome, a goal that you're trying to work against. But as long as you do that, we trade perfect for good enough. Right? Because that's typically what also often is good enough to create growth. So I think that's such an important takeaway for me. Like, maybe a little bit of a — I'm exaggerating now — but a little bit of a liberation, you know, of RevOps. Do not feel stuck with being pitch perfect all the time.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Totally. Yeah. Someone called out on the post this explore side of RevOps and then this exploit side of RevOps. And thinking about RevOps along those two different sides of the coin — like, there's experimentation, moving fast, we have the technical skills, we know how the systems work, we're so well positioned to focus on that just as much as we're focused on scaling what works and driving predictability. And so I think RevOps really has to find that balance. Another thing somebody called out in response — Clark Dixon — he said, the untapped advantage of RevOps is our organizational context. And I think for me that just reiterated why I was just a little bit confused why this new function was popping up that seemed in some cases to be disconnected from RevOps. Because I think the value of it being so closely tied in with RevOps, whether it reports into it or not, is that RevOps has so much context on the funnel. Like, we see all the bottlenecks. We understand what's happening across marketing and how that impacts pipeline and sales. And if RevOps can harness that context for the larger org, it's just super duper valuable. And the GTM engineer needs to have that context too. They can't operate in a silo. They have to know how these deals progress down funnel and what the impact is of what they're doing in sourcing pipeline. So I think that's just why I struggled with this concept at first, but now I'm fully embracing it. Like, we're gonna learn a ton. I'm really excited about it because I think it changes the way that we do RevOps overall.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think, Philipp, you made a great point, right, on this. Okay. You have that role. It's part of RevOps. It gets all the context, to your point, Lindsay, but then it basically has the ability to be cross functional within the team and execute and experiment and be very close to the customer reality. I think this is something that you also want. You want to be very close to the customer reality because if you're orchestrating outbound campaigns, you need to know what the key pain points are, what your competitors are, what the plays are. So I think these things are very real and I feel like — and this is to the audience, right — if you get basically, hey, you're a tooling and reporting function, you need to step up and get closer to the customer reality because that's really the next career step from my point of view. If you ever wanna become a leader, like an executive leader at the company, that is just part of the reality. And I think the beautiful thing is you can actually — there's probably no CRO that goes in, takes all your call recordings and then creates strategic insights, briefs or reports out of it. But most people in RevOps can do it. Right? So you can go basically and say, look, I found out this is the reality and we should do something about it. And this will elevate you into a more strategic conversation and also give you a great tool to learn more about these things. And I think the same is true with outbound campaigns. I would assume that the marketing ops or go to market engineers are very good at measuring and understanding what works versus maybe some of the leaders in the business function being more removed from it, and then being able to scale that. And I think that's like a huge opportunity for the function itself.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: I think that's such a great point because it's actually building this connection to the customer, strong business acumen, strong growth mindset, and it's almost building on all of the RevOps skills that we typically see, which is, you know, analytical, technical, building narratives, forecasting. Like, those skills now are augmented, and I think that's really exciting for the future of RevOps. The future is bright.

Philipp Stelzer: The future is bright. I love the passion. I love the positive outlook. I think it's exactly the thing we need — which will probably be the first episode of 2026 for us. So great, I love it. Lindsay, you have a meeting very soon and so I think this is a good time to end. For those who don't follow Lindsay on LinkedIn yet, right, it's very easy to find. Lindsay Roethlisberger. And yeah, people can find you easily. But always one final question. What is like a book or something to read that you would recommend to our audience?

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Let's see. So most of my reading — I have a five year old, so I used to really decompress. So I read things that we probably don't need to share on this podcast. However, I took a course that was extremely, extremely valuable for me. So my background, as I mentioned, marketing, marketing operations, and moving into the RevOps function can feel a little bit scary when you don't have a lot of the financial modeling experience and the sales process expertise, knowing how to stand up a deal desk, etcetera. So I highly recommend Winning by Design's revenue architecture course. I felt like it really brought in my perspective into how revenue architecture drives growth overall. And so I highly recommend that, especially for folks transitioning from a marketing ops role into like a full RevOps role.

Philipp Stelzer: Great. I think it's one of the few courses and coaching opportunities out there in the market that is not a scam. So definitely — yeah. We have Jacco on the show as well when they launched the book, and he talked us through the data model. And yeah, I think it's been great. So, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining. This was great. I hope we'll do a v2 at some point, and yeah, all the best for your meeting now.

Lindsay Roethlisberger: Yes. Thank you both so much. Happy to be here.