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Hiii - It’s me again! Your original author and GTM guru here taking back my newsletter. 😁
A massive thank you to my wonderful guest authors for helping me keep this thread alive through maternity leave. 🙏
Elles Skony - master community builder & people leader
Jared Gibson - founder brand & thought leadership expert
Richard Washington - GTM talent architect & advisor
Corrina Owens - ABM aficionado & architect
Alright - we’re going back to basics this week. Because every. single. time. I audit a new startup (30+ now), I find the same RevOps issues.
And here’s the thing, RevOps is the foundation you need for successful AI implementation AND successful hiring. And you’re gonna need both to scale.
It’s non-negotiable.
Let’s dive in. 🏊♀
Why RevOps is your secret weapon (for both humans and AI)
I've been hearing two things on repeat lately from founders:
"We need to hire [insert GTM role here]"
"We need to figure out how to use AI to help with [sales/marketing/everything]"
Here's the thing - both of those things will fail (or at least seriously underperform) without one critical ingredient ➡ solid RevOps.
Think about it this way - whether you're bringing on AI agents to help qualify leads or hiring a new AE to close deals, they both need the same thing to be successful: clean data, clear processes, and the right tech stack to support them.
You wouldn't hire a sales rep and not give them a CRM, email access, or any information about your ICP, right?
The same goes for AI. It's not magic - it's only as good as the foundation you give it to work with.
So before you make your next hire OR implement that shiny new AI tool, let's make sure your RevOps house is in order. 🏠
Why RevOps infrastructure is non-negotiable for success
Here's what I've seen happen over and over:
Scenario 1: A founder hires their first sales rep. That rep has no documented sales process, no clean CRM data to prospect from, no call recording to learn from past deals, and no clear understanding of what "good" looks like. Three months later, pipeline growth is flat, conversions are dropping, and the founder is back in every deal.
Scenario 2: A founder implements an AI SDR tool to help with outbound. But the ICP data in their CRM is a mess - missing job titles, duplicate accounts, outdated contact info. The AI starts sending emails to the wrong people with irrelevant messaging. The tool gets blamed, but the real issue was the foundation.
Sound familiar?
RevOps isn't just operations for operations' sake. It's the infrastructure that makes both your human talent AND your AI tools actually effective.
When you have solid RevOps:
New hires ramp faster because they have clear processes, clean data, and documented best practices
Marketing is more effective because you can properly segment, target, and nurture your network
AI tools perform better because they're working with quality inputs and structured workflows
Your entire GTM team moves faster because everyone has the same source of truth
You can actually see what's working (and what's not) with real data instead of gut feel
The Minimum Viable Tech Stack
Okay, let's get practical and tactical. My speciality.
If you're just getting started with RevOps, or if you need a mark-to-market, here's what you actually need - no fluff, no "nice to haves," just the essentials.
The 6 Essential Tools:
CRM - Your source of truth for all customer and prospect data
Sales Engagement Tool - Sequences, templates, and outreach automation
Marketing Automation Tool - Nurture campaigns, marketing comms and automation
Lead Data - Accurate contact and company information to find new leads and to continuously enrich your CRM
Knowledge Management System - Your internal wiki/intranet for processes, playbooks, and documentation
Call Recording Software - Record, transcribe, and analyze your sales conversations
Now here's where it gets better - you don't need 6 different tools to cover all these bases.
My Recommended MVT (Minimum Viable Tech Stack):
HubSpot - This checks off at least THREE boxes: CRM, sales engagement, and marketing email/automation. Yes, there are other CRMs out there, but HubSpot is the most cost-effective and robust (cost to value) out there with a generous startup discount.
Apollo - The most cost-effective lead data tool out there. Clean contact data, company information, and integrates directly with HubSpot. You could also use Apollo for sales engagement and call recording.
Notion - Hands down the best budget-friendly knowledge management solution. Use it for your sales playbooks, process documentation, onboarding materials, and team wiki.
Fireflies - My favorite call recording tool (though Otter, Grain, etc all work too). Just make sure whatever you choose has a native integration with your CRM. Fireflies plays nicely with HubSpot and won't break the bank.
Total cost for this stack? You can get started for under $500/month for a small team.
Compare that to the cost of a bad hire or an underperforming AI tool because you didn't have the foundation in place. No brainer.
The RevOps Starter Checklist: 3 Things to Get Right Immediately
Once you have your minimum viable tech stack set up, here's what you need to implement right away. These are table stakes - if you don't have these in place, everything else will be harder than it needs to be.
1. Core Data Hygiene
This is the foundation of your foundation. Your CRM data needs to be clean, enriched, and maintained - not just at setup, but continuously.
What you need:
Data Enrichment - Make sure you're enriching missing or incomplete data like job titles, company industries, company size, etc. This isn't just for pretty reports - you need this to segment your audiences properly for both outbound prospecting AND email marketing.
For example, if you're targeting "VPs of Sales at Series A-B SaaS companies with 50-200 employees," you can't do that if half your records are missing job titles or company size data.
Most lead data tools (like Apollo) can help with enrichment, or you can use HubSpot's data enrichment features which just got a glow up.
Deduping - Duplicate records are the enemy of good data. Have someone on your team set up a monthly process (put it on your calendar right now) to review and dedupe your accounts and contacts.
Why monthly? Because duplicates creep in fast - from form fills, manual entry, integrations, imports, you name it. The longer you wait, the worse it gets and the harder it is to clean up.
2. Pipeline Hygiene
If your CRM is the house, your pipeline data is the rooms where the actual work happens. This is the data you collect, store, and manage on your deals/opportunities.
You need to be tracking the right information on every deal so you can:
Forecast accurately
Identify bottlenecks in your sales process
Revisit or nurture lost opps
Understand what's working and what's not
Coach your team effectively
….and more.
I've written a few related articles on what to track and manage on your deals, which you can check out here:
A tip to keep yourself and your team honest? Setup a dashboard to show you exactly which deals are missing critical information. Reports on this dashboard would include:
Deals missing an owner
Deals missing an amount
Deals missing a source
…and so on. Schedule this dashboard to be sent out weekly to everyone who owns deals. It’s like a naughty list that you want to make sure you aren’t on.
3. Capture ALL Client Interactions in Your CRM
I don't care how good someone's memory is - you can't build a scalable revenue engine on people's brainpower alone. Everything needs to live in your CRM so it's searchable, referenceable, and available to your entire team (present and future).
How to make this happen:
Connect your Email & Calendar to your CRM - Set up your email and calendar to automatically sync with your CRM. HubSpot makes this stupid easy - every email and meeting with a prospect or customer gets logged automatically. No manual entry required.
This does two things:
Keeps a complete record of all touchpoints with each account
Surfaces communication in context when someone else on your team needs to jump in
Use Call Recording Software - This is non-negotiable in 2025. Every sales call should be recorded, transcribed, and stored.
Why?
Because:
New hires can listen to real calls to ramp faster
AI can analyze call patterns to identify what's working
You can coach based on actual conversations, not hearsay
You never have to rely on someone's "rough notes" from a key discovery call
The key: Make sure your call recording software is set up to automatically feed call summaries and key insights into your CRM. Fireflies does this beautifully with HubSpot - every call gets summarized and logged to the deal record automatically.
The Bottom Line
Whether you're hiring your first sales rep, implementing an AI SDR, leveraging AI for content creation, win/loss analysis, etc - they're only going to be as good as the RevOps foundation you give them to work with.
Clean data, clear processes, and the right tech stack aren't "nice to haves" anymore. They're the baseline requirement for any GTM motion that's going to scale.
The good news? You don't need a massive budget or a dedicated RevOps FTE to get started. You just need to commit to doing these basics from day one. If you’re late - start today.
Start with the minimum viable tech stack. Get your data hygiene, pipeline hygiene, and interaction capture in place. Then build from there.
Your future hires (human and AI) will thank you.
Some other related articles
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