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Planning - Organization like your growth model and capacity planning.Process - Things like sales, staging, qualification, process handoffs. Systems - The big pain most times. Salesforce, HubSpot Outreach, CPQ, and every GTM system—both implementation and administration. Reporting - GTM Ops on the hook for reporting is how we think of it. All the dashboards, performance to goal reporting and all the metrics that you'll need for the board.Enablement - Getting teams trained up and then giving them the assets and documentation, making sure they have everything they need to use the systems and reporting.
Playbooks - tapping into proven playbooks, bringing in hundreds of battle tested projects across 50+ go to markets.Adaptability - there's new GTM tools every other week, but we see hundreds of tools each year and we sift through what's working and what's not. ,Talent - GTM Ops is bigger than just one person. It requires an entire team, and in the market in general, there's a shortage of talent for this type of work. (we know because we’re scooping up A++ GTM Ops pros every day). The work is engineering heavy and usually outside of super experienced people, they've only seen a couple of go to markets at a very high level. Speed - which again comes back to the Capital Clock. It's not just hard to find people, but it's hard to find people who've done it at your stage with your tooling and can hit the ground running without burning three months on onboarding. Then they have to build it all from scratch, usually shorthanded when working with a partner. You get senior startup operators. Live in days, not months. Focus - when we look at companies that scaled fastest and most efficiently, companies like Chainguard, they didn't try to reinvent the wheel. They brought in specialists, they plugged in the systems, they focused their energy on the things that no one else could do for them. Like their product, their messaging, their customers, their board meetings, etc.Costs - it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build this team in-house. Plus includes the risk of them not working out, which we see all the time. It seems logical to keep growing this department with FTEs, but this is a great way to cut the bloat in the go-to-market org, which everyone is trying to do right now, to be more efficient. You can save more for quota carrying reps, along with preserving more equity.
GTM Architect - the main point of contact that understands the business and is able to zoom out.While deeply understanding the systems and reporting implications, they're paired up with a dedicated GTM Engineer GTM Engineer - an expert in systems and will create another work stream to get things done more quickly.
Seed to Series A - we typically completely own the GTM Ops function Series B - we tend to work with an executive who owns this function internally, and they're usually guiding the large strategic decisions. Series C and beyond - we typically augment individual org directors across sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops, and partner ops.
Architect: dedicated strategic technical points-of-contactGTM Engineer: dedicated engineering to make sure there's never any technical bottlenecks.Partners: dedicated support all the executive needs (strategic + eng)Centers of Excellence: internal experts across all GTM Ops 
LeanScale is the embedded GTM ops team behind some of the fastest growing names in B2B Tech, like Mistral, Chainguard, and Clio. And our team exclusively works with high growth VC B2B backed companies.
That's where we spend all of our time, all of our resources, all of our hiring, and we share all the work that we do with our customers on our channel, which is one of the largest in the entire B2B space.
We built LeanScale to support, go-to-market team's ability to scale quickly and efficiently. Here's why it's a big problem.
1️⃣ The “Capital Clock”
The Capital Clock, as we call it, illustrates the constraints in the game that we're all playing
Every four quarters, there's an expectation to show enough traction before runway runs out. You have to grow quickly and efficiently.
What we usually see is GTM teams who raise a round get really fired up and focused most attention on closing deals and hiring.
Both are important, but that is not all that is required to show traction quickly enough.
GTM leaders need to invest in the repeatability, the “machine”. Most just didn't understand the volume of what has to get built. To handle that quick of scale, to hire all of those people, to close all of those deals and looking out quarters ahead, not just one quarter at a time, gotta do both.
But again, just having that last mile also in the back of your mind and something you're building towards. So here is what a very basic example of all of this work underneath the surface that needs to get done. It requires different skill sets, which the color coding gives an example of (strategic, technical and reporting).
GTM Ops teams need to be able to do all three of those things.
And then there are different skill sets around all the process, the systems, etc. So you can see it broken out here with revenue ops and pipeline ops. Most GTM ops teams are usually just understaffed to focus more resources on those with quotas and bringing them in and making sure you're hitting those.
Completely understandable, super important. But the full scope of GTM Ops is very vast. We explore that below.
2️⃣ What is GTM Operations?
The GTM Ops Matrix covers everything from marketing, partnership, sales and CS.
Our GTM Ops Projects Menu is a list of all the playbooks we’ve built per department. Each of these are tied to an outcome to improve go to market performance based on what's not working in the growth model. (more on that below)/
Each of these have been tested on a lot of go-to markets. So we've done the initial iterating for you to save time with your Capital Clock.
Our GTM Ops Flywheel highlights how we help prioritize all projects at the right time to keep things moving quick based on your go-to-market targets. There's a lot to do. There really isn't time to make too many mistakes.
Exponential growth for companies is kind of like F1 racing 🚗. There's a limited margin for error.
We manage reporting to the plan and prioritize milestones based on what have the highest impact on you hitting that target.
So everything's anchored in that target. This approach works hand in hand with the project suggestions.
One call out. This does not have anything to do with the day-to-day. Things will always change. We manage all ad hoc tasks, bugs, workflows, list uploads, reports, dashboards, etc.
We're also used to pivoting, but having this line of sight always gives us a useful compass. Sounds simple, but this usually gets harder and harder to do over time, and we believe we've cracked the code.
3️⃣ In-House vs Partner
To address the question of hiring full-time folks or bringing in an agency like LeanScale.
There's no perfect answer, but there's a few considerations.
We built the model around that we think provide some big upside.
Just a few considerations we've seen after working with a 50+ VC-backed B2B SaaS companies.
4️⃣ Leanscale GTM Pod Structure
We've iterated on the best team structure. After working with hundreds of go-to-market teams, we cover all angles.
Core Team
In addition to them, we have our centers of excellence, internal full-time experts, and every part of the go-to-market.
For example, if we want to build out advanced attribution, we'd loop in attribution and marketing automation platform experts in addition to the core team. So you always have someone here that's able to cover every gap that you all come into contact with.
And then depending on your stage, we tend to partner with teams in a few different ways.
5️⃣ Working with LeanScale
LeanScale GTM pods are build to be like SWAT teams that come in to your GTM. With multiple work streams.
Weekly Cadence
Generally, we run like an engineering team.
Every week we have a sprint and discuss task associated with the prioritized milestones we're working on. At the end of the week, we send detailed summaries and videos of everything we did that week. And then you can also check progress, live in Teamwork. That's our app to track progress to 15 minute mark.
Outside of the established projects daily, we work in email, slack ad hoc meetings, just like an internal teammate.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "A refreshing take on RevOps" - David H.
The embedded GTM Ops team behind the worlds fastest growing companies like Mistral AI, Clio, and Chainguard.
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