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Tessa Whittaker is the VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo, where she leads a 70-person global team powering one of SaaS’s most efficient $1B+ revenue engines. Over the past decade, she’s helped architect the systems, cadence, and AI workflows that underpin how ZoomInfo operates at scale.
Tessa is known as one of the most thoughtful operators in tech, bringing structure, clarity, and rigor to how GTM organizations run. Her work sits at the intersection of data, process, and execution, proving that with the right operating cadence, even the most complex go-to-market systems can move in rhythm.
Discussed in this episode
- Building a personal operating system (Salesforce’s V2MOM, Notion, weekly reviews) that maps vision → methods → measurable actions.
- “Operating rhythm” for GTM: the meetings, reviews, and enablement that create predictable execution.
- Color-coding calendars to align time with quarterly KPIs (and fixing misallocation).
- Counterintuitive up-market move: automate down-market so scarce humans focus on enterprise.
- AI intake & prioritization agent: compressing 10–15 hrs of RevOps scoping into one interaction.
- Democratizing creation: org-wide agent “hackathons,” usage leaderboards, and adoption lessons.
- Health OS during sprints: cut alcohol, protect sleep, simplify to sustain output.
- What to buy vs. build; auditing tech stacks; avoiding (and accepting some) agent sprawl.
Episode highlights
00:00 — Systems beat motivation; why cadence creates consistency.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=0
01:36 — RevOps as connective tissue of SaaS; the “invest earlier” regret.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=95
03:58 — From EA to SVP-level ops leader to VP RevOps: the long workback.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=238
06:51 — Why operators obsess over simplifying complexity.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=410
12:24 — Time as the scarcest resource: color-coding calendars to goals.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=743
20:05 — The RevOps operating rhythm at ZoomInfo (and how AI slots in).
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=1205
21:48 — Going upmarket? Automate downmarket first to free resources.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=1307
31:19 — Intake agent: collapsing 10–15 hours of back-and-forth into one interaction.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=1879
36:48 — Democratizing creation: internal agent hackathons and a usage leaderboard.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=2207
44:30 — The Alchemist and reframing growth: get uncomfortable to keep climbing.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwZlpC8c1Hk&t=2670
Key Takeaways
1. Act Like Time Is Your Budget.
Calendar math doesn’t lie, color-code meetings against quarterly KPIs and kill anything that doesn’t move a metric. Your utilization is your strategy, whether you admit it or not.
2. Cadence Creates Outcomes.
Daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews hard-wire execution and eliminate one-off heroics. A good operating rhythm turns priorities into muscle memory.
3. Automate Down-Market To Win Up-Market.
When you reallocate sellers to enterprise, let RevOps make SMB run itself. This is how you avoid starving the base while you chase whales.
4. Replace Intake Chaos With An Agent.
One AI flow can capture requirements, ask the right questions, and score priority. Collapsing 10–15 hours per request unlocks weeks of capacity per quarter.
5. Prioritize By Impact, Not Volume.
The loudest voice used to win; the agent’s scoring ends that game. Work queues should map to revenue leverage, not decibel levels.
6. Make AI Adoption Hands-On.
Hackathons, leaderboards, and “build one agent that solves a real problem” beats slideware. Once operators feel the leverage, usage compounds.
7. Health Is A Throughput Constraint.
In sprints, cut alcohol and defend sleep. Your recovery determines your ship rate more than another late-night “just one more” session.
8. Buy Vs. Build Is A Weekly Question.
Constantly demo the market to avoid reinventing the wheel. Then build where your data advantage or workflow depth creates defensibility.
9. Systems Beat Motivation.
Translate 3–5 year visions into quarterly methods and weekly measures (V2MOM works). When energy dips, systems keep the flywheel moving.
10. Grow By Choosing Discomfort.
Optimize for new reps, not comfort. Treat failure as a data point; the real risk is not trying.
This episode is brought to you by our sponsors: Pursuit
The best talent isn’t actively job hunting. Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. As a key GTMfund partner, they equip sales and marketing teams with top performers.
If you’re hiring for sales or marketing roles, reach out to Pursuit at pursuitsalessolutions.com/gtm or message a GTMfund team member.
Follow Tessa Whittaker
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessa-whittaker-44903940
- Company: https://www.zoominfo.com
Recommended books
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho — a reminder to keep moving toward your “personal legend,” even when comfort is tempting.
Referenced
- ZoomInfo: https://www.zoominfo.com
- Notion: https://www.notion.so
- Riverside: https://riverside.fm
- Tableau: https://www.tableau.com
- ClickHouse: https://clickhouse.com
- Pavilion (operator community): https://www.joinpavilion.com
- Accord: https://www.withaccord.com
Host links
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
Where to Find GTMnow
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
GTM 168 Episode Transcript
Tessa Whittaker: (00:00.192)
Systems are so important because it’s really easy to wake up and do everything you’re supposed to do when you’re feeling really motivated, but you need those systems in place when you’re not motivated. I think it’s really important to have a operating cadence with how you’re running your business. So we talk a lot about the operating rhythm or the rhythm of the business with a go-to-market. You’re creating kind of structure and rigor for how they’re operating as well.
Every breakout company has a system behind it. Not just a product, not just a team. A system that connects everything, data, process, execution. That is where RevOps comes in. We talk to hundreds of off-years through portfolio companies, through our LPs, through our media brand. And the number one consistent thing that they all say is their biggest regret is not investing in RevOps earlier. And on the flip side, it’s also the thing that they credit their growth to when it goes well.
In this episode, I sit down with Tessa Whitaker, who leads revenue operations at Zoom Info, the over a billion dollar global revenue engine. Rev Ops has become the connective tissue of SAS, where data meets execution and AIs redefining how teams operate. And as Tessa puts it,
AI has been a great equalizer. It allows you, even if you aren’t the most technical operator, to execute and create faster than ever before.
This conversation is a masterclass in systems thinking. All right, let’s get into it.
Sophie Buonassisi: (01:35.704)
Tessa, welcome to the podcast. It’s such a fun privilege to be able to pick your brain specifically for many reasons. But one is that, you know, we talk to hundreds of operators through portfolio companies, through our LPs, through our media brand. And the number one consistent thing that they all say is their biggest regret is not investing in DevOps earlier.
And on the flip side, it’s also the thing that they credit their growth to when it goes well. You have gone and scaled your career to, you have gone and essentially scaled your career now to run RevOps at one of the most iconic companies, ZoomInfo. But it’s super fun to be sitting down together and pick your brain on this. Like how did you go first and foremost from a career standpoint to running RevOps at ZoomInfo?
You know, it’s funny because even now, now that I’m sitting in this at RebOps role, it’s funny to be like, wow, I’m like in the hottest job in tech right now. I really believe that. Like, I think it’s so cool to see RebOps front and center and especially in the age of AI right now, where RebOps is really re-architecting how we think about the go-to-market through this AI first lens. And so it’s just a really exciting time to be in that role. But interesting enough,
I started my career in tech as an executive assistant. We’ve talked about this before. So I was right out of college, moving into San Francisco. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, that I was going to go to law school. And I got a job right away as an assistant at this law firm. And they paid me no money. I think there were times where I was pulling together quarters to figure out how to take the bus to get down to the law firm. Yeah.
And I had a recruiter reach out first to go to another recruiting firm to be an EA. And then within three months, I got invited to essentially apply for this executive assistant role at Salesforce. And so I started at Salesforce in 2014 as an executive assistant. So ma’am, I supported three sales leaders. And then over the period of
Tessa Whittaker: (03:58.09)
It’s just under a decade. went from executive assistant to senior director running strategy and operations for the global enterprise at Tableau. So I had gone over as part of the acquisition and it was really the most incredible journey. I’ve actually never talked about this before, but I think it was about two years before I left Salesforce. They had us do these IDPs, individual development plans. And you would talk about your strengths and what you were working on.
And you would say, you know, here is my vision of what I want to do in three to five years. And I actually put, I will leave Salesforce when I get a VP of RevOps job at a company under 5,000 people. I didn’t even know what RevOps was. This row is just specific. And I laugh about that because one of my mentors, she’s head of operations at ClickHouse. And I were talking about this recently and
Siffer, it was so sp-
Tessa Whittaker: (04:57.802)
I had that conversation with her and I remember her and I talking about it and I had no idea what Rev Ops really was or I think what I thought it was is definitely not what it is. So the power of, guess, manifestation. But yeah, during Dreamforce one year, I met the COO of ZoomInfo at the time and they invited me to apply and I came over and
I had always been more on the sales operations or pipeline operations side. And this was the first time that I had really gotten technical. Yeah. And so all of a sudden, was VP of DevOps at Zoom Info. I think my org was around 70 at that time. Half of it were these go-to-market engineers. And I had never led engineering before.
That’s a huge jump. Yeah, was. But what a wild thing that you wrote down that specifically you would leave when you became a VP of RebOps, even at, yes, a certain headcount of companies.
But yeah, it’s where it’s so oddly specific. think I thought rev ops meant sales. I don’t know. I think at that time, no one really knew what rev ops was like. Now when you say rev ops, people know what rev ops is. is this umbrella that encompasses all different types of operational teams. So you have your traditional sales ops, partner ops, know, operational teams that are
doing the territory planning or the quota setting or the pipeline management or the forecast. And then you have the teams that are maybe more product management or processing systems. So taking all the processes across the business and automating it into the systems, managing the revenue tech stack, all the integrations. Like when you talk about Rebots now, people know what it is. Three years ago, no one really knew what Rebots was and everyone had a different title. It really has been this title now that people are rebranding under.
Sophie Buonassisi: (06:50.93)
Mm-hmm. So why did you pick rev-ops of all things that what attracted you to manifest or or hope or guess that that would be the path?
Yeah, I think it goes back to even when I was in EA. think about really good operators like to solve really complex problems and they like to take things that are maybe really complicated and simplify them to operate as efficiently as possible. And I think back to like even being in EA and it was like you had no choice but to just get shit done. Like there was no…
you know, challenge or problem that came up that you had the ability not to solve. Like your job was just to figure it out. Right. And I think with operators, you know, you know that no matter what you have to execute. And so I think it was just this natural progression for me that, you know, taking the, core skills that I had from an EA and then naturally kind of something I was just naturally good at. Yeah.
really interesting. It almost goes to the power of, I mean, manifestation, but also setting a goal and hitting that goal. And in order to do so, you usually have to actually run and develop systems to hit those goals. as a lot, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. What are your personal systems, before we even get into rev ops, but to go from your EA position to running rev ops at just a
incredible company. What did you actually do to get there? How do you focus on your internal systems? I know that’s a very loaded question, but how do you think about that world of test operating systems?
Tessa Whittaker: (08:38.158)
Yeah, that’s a great question. think that it’s a muscle that I’ve developed over time that is deeply, I’d say, rooted in discipline. Yeah. But I think that, you know, systems are so important because it’s really easy to wake up and do everything you’re supposed to do when you’re feeling really motivated. But you need those systems in place when…
you’re not motivated. So I’ve always been really goal oriented, like even, you know, like I said, going through that individual development thing, like I want to be this, but I’ve always thought, you know, what are the things that I want to accomplish long-term and then been really good at, you know, taking the long-term goals or that long-term vision or where do I see myself in three to five years? And then being able to translate that vision back to the tactical, which is funny because that’s what I do at work.
as well, I’d say that’s one of my superpowers is how do you take where you want to go in that big vision and be really excited about it, but then break that down in a really simplified way in tactical execution steps. so I do that with my personal life. Actually, this year is the first year it got a lot easier because I used GPT to basically do it, which was, you know, what are the, you know, across the five different areas of my life? What are the goals that I want to set this year?
and then breaking those out by quarter and then building them into a notion system where I then am tracking myself against those goals and then having check-ins with myself weekly or bi-weekly on how I’m tracking against all of those things to hold myself accountable. And we were talking a little bit, we’re both training for Marathon. that’s also been, I think it’s actually helped me from my system thinking.
even further because it’s so rooted in discipline and routine that it’s waking up and even when you don’t want to do something, you’re holding yourself accountable to doing something. But I think, again, having that big vision, breaking down the tactical, building it into a system, like I said, notion, and then having that operating cadence, that rhythm of my own personal business where I’m reflecting to see if I’m actually on track has been really helpful to hold myself accountable.
Sophie Buonassisi: (11:00.312)
Super Systemized.
Before we dive in, a quick word on hiring. It’s a weird market out there right now, but finding top go-to-market talent is still one of the biggest levers for growth. At GTM Fund, we’ve made over 2,000 Canada intros and placed hundreds of eight players. One of our go-to recruiting partners is Pursuit. They specialize in sales and marketing talent, and they do it without a retainer. We work with them closely across many roles. If you’re hiring, go to pursuitsalessolutions.com forward slash GTM, that’ll be in the show notes, or ping someone from the GTM Fund team. We’ll get you connected.
You said there were five things that you track. What are those five things?
So I would say there’s like health, like physical mental health. Yeah. Which is really important. There’s finances. So like, am I doing financially against my goals or spending or what I want to be saving? There’s relationships, both friends and family. How am spending my time there? There is now I’m going to lose track of my professionally. So what am I doing from a
professional standpoint, both in my job and creatively. And then it would be just like growth. So what am I doing from a personal development or professional development to make sure that I’m continuing to drive myself forward?
Sophie Buonassisi: (12:23.572)
Very cool. And how often do you review those?
So probably I would say like I try to do it weekly, but it’s mostly, you just put 30 minutes on your calendar to see how you’re tracking. you know, I think you think about all the different ways you want to spend your time and all the different things you want to accomplish. Like you don’t have a just endless amount of time. And so if you think of it like, you know, like a pizza or a pie chart, and if you’re spending, you know, this much more time.
maybe on your relationships or you’re spending this much more time on fitness. Like there’s other parts of your life where that pie or that triangle is gonna get a lot smaller. So even reflecting on, okay, this is how I’m tracking against my goals. Well, how did I spend my time? Does my time actually match my goals? And something that I actually started doing at work is color coding my calendar against my different goals that I have professionally. So.
you have, you know, I don’t know, for me, I’m in way too many meetings. I’ve probably sat in 11 hours of meetings a day. And I have four to five core goals per quarter with KPIs that I’m trying to hit. And then color coding all of those meetings against those goals and saying, okay, well, am I spending 80 % of my time against one of those goals and my other four goals, I’m only spending 20 % of my time. How do I either delegate or cancel meetings or consolidate to ensure that I’m
equally spending my time against the most important things to hit my goals, which are ultimately a reflection of what I need to do to move the business forward.
Sophie Buonassisi: (13:56.782)
So it sounds like you’re almost doing a time tracking exercise to make sure that you’re allocating your most precious finite resource time towards those five.
Yeah, super systematized about how I happen my time because I think, you know, it’s so easy for us to get really locked in or focused on one thing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing sometimes. Like, right. You have to be obsessed to hit big goals. If anyone has talked to me in the last month, the only thing I talk about is running. Um, but I think it’s really important to check ourselves and saying, are we spending our time in the right places to ultimately hit our personal and professional?
strategic goals that we that we’re setting out to do.
Now, are you structuring it similar to an annual planning exercise where you’ve got your five things in your notion board and now we’re reviewing them weekly? Do you have quarterly KPIs too? what is, I guess, weekly cadence? What’s the next level of cadence when you’re actually kind of restructuring it? The quarterly and absolute cycle. They’re going to be taking notes. I’m like already taking notes and then mentally visualizing doing this.
sick.
Tessa Whittaker: (14:59.414)
I anyone
Tessa Whittaker: (15:07.374)
You know what’s funny? I always go back to this and it’s kind of cheesy, but like I love the Salesforce B2Mom. Okay. Yeah. this, you know, probably because that was the first exposure I ever had to goal setting and I was 23 years old. Yeah. When I started working there. And it’s this idea that you have this like high level vision statement and then underneath it you have like, what are your like five core values?
And then underneath that, what are your methods and measures of which you’re going to basically achieve that vision? And so like you’re, you you have your vision statement, here are the values that I’m gonna follow, and then you have, here’s my method, so I’m gonna do this, and then your measures underneath it are going to be the specific actions you take that are like, that you can measure over, you know, days, weeks, months, quarters of time. And so you might say, okay, to accomplish this vision, I need to do this thing this year.
Here’s what I’m gonna do in Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 to accomplish that.
Mm-hmm. You do a work back. I love that. a work back plan. The way, and I’ve kind of structured my planning today a little bit differently. I think I’m going to try and adopt your model because I actually love the systematized framing a lot more. Mine is similar. It’s a bit of a burner analogy on a stovetop. So everyone’s kind of, you know, turning different elements on. You can turn them up, you can turn them down. So it’s a similar kind of time allocation.
Okay. All right, excellent. We’ll.
Tessa Whittaker: (16:23.352)
to.
Sophie Buonassisi: (16:34.04)
But then similarly, it will be around friends and family, relationships, connection, fashion, adventure and growth, financial and so forth. And so you’re constantly optimizing and adjusting your burners every single quarter. But when you commit to something on a quarterly basis, you know exactly how much temperature gauge you’re going to turn it up and what that means for your KPIs and kind of actions under it.
I wouldn’t say I’m reviewing them weekly, so I think I need to be a little bit more diligent about that, because that truly is how you make progress. You don’t track it. You can’t make progress.
I think so. I mean, there’s certainly, we also have talked about this before, times where I am, I have so much on my plate that maybe, like, all right, we’re gonna take a pause with that for a couple of weeks and you’re just literally focused on going from the next thing to the next thing, because that’s all that you have capacity for. And of course there’s times like that, but being able to kind of fall back on those systems when you are feeling burnt out or you have so much going on, it can be incredibly helpful to get back on track.
Absolutely. And you do have a ton going on right now, especially at this particular moment because you’re running a marathon in a mere few weeks. Yeah. So you’ve got your systems, real goal planning, you’re successfully hitting your goals based on that system. But what are you doing even right now when things get crazy busy in your life? How are you actually falling back on those systems and maintaining your health side? What’s the health operating system?
Yeah, interesting. So I think I take a much simpler approach when it comes to health. Yeah. Which is, it’s, you when things, when you’re overwhelmed or there’s a lot going on, the two things I fall back on are cut alcohol and sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, know, you can be on the circuit and you’re going to a lot of conferences or you’re throwing a lot of events and that all is really incredibly exhausting.
Tessa Whittaker: (18:24.672)
And even if you have one or two drinks while you’re on the road or doing those things, it can make it so much more exhausting. And so when I know that I’m going through a really, you know, when I’m going through a certain sprint of work or, you know, training or anything personally or professionally, the first thing I’ll cut is…
Okay, I’m not even gonna have one or two drinks socially. You have that out and then make sure that I’m getting at least seven hours of sleep.
Yeah, right. Let’s simplify it. Yeah, simplify it. OK, brilliant, brilliant. So we’ve got the TESA operating system around the goal planning, the health side. Are there other aspects under the operating system that we haven’t touched on?
I mean, I think it’s really important that you have obviously your own operating system, but then also facilitating and helping the people on your teams or the leaders that you’re working with to also have systems that they can fall back on. I think it’s really important to have a operating cadence with how you’re running your business. So we talk a lot about the operating rhythm or the rhythm of the business for the go-to-market. Yeah. So what are the things that we’re doing?
daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, what are the different meetings that have to happen, what are the data reviews that have to happen, what are the different enablements or trainings that have to happen. But I also think it’s really important to have that for your internal org to make sure that they have routine and predictable meetings and checkpoints. So you’re creating kind of structure and rigor for how they’re operating as well. And so for RevOps,
Tessa Whittaker: (20:05.006)
At ZoomInfo, we have our RevOps operating rhythm that we fall back on. And then we have, of course, systems that support that as well, which help us operate as efficiently and productively as possible. And now with AI, we’ve been able to take a lot of all the manual tasks that RevOps did before and automate and or leverage AI to give us a lot of time back, which has been possible because
We were so structured and already operating with a rigor prior to this.
Yeah, you almost have the system in place for AI to come in and actually scale. But you had to implement that system first, which takes a lot of discipline and rigor. Yeah. And if we think about RevOps overall, it is the system that underlies growth, especially for venture scale companies. You can’t skip that step. Right. And so if you were, let’s say, given, let’s say hypothetically, a challenge or a request from the team, and the objective is to go upmarket,
How do you think about that from a systems rev ops approach? How do you break down any kind of growth goal to that foundation?
Yeah. What’s interesting, when people talk about going up market, one of the first conversations that will happen is how are we going to reallocate resources to go up market? So what does that mean? What does that mean from a seller perspective? What does that mean from a sales development perspective? What does that mean from a support perspective? And I remember having this conversation with my leader, and ZoomInfo has been very focused on going up market in the enterprise the last couple of years. And I think that
Tessa Whittaker: (21:47.948)
I think the question that he asked me exactly was, how are you going to think about the reallocation of your resources to support this upmarket growth? And it was funny because I said, well, I’m in rev ops. I’m not going to reallocate my resources upmarket. I need to focus more down market. And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, if you’re going upmarket with your resources predominantly, you need to automate as much downmarket as you can because you’re pulling resources off of it.
So what were the things that you had people focused on before? What were the things that were maybe manual before? What are the things that you had more people focused on before? And then how do you build out new processes, new systems, now AI workflows to support that down market so that you can pull people off of it because it’s going to run itself?
Fascinating. Okay, so it’s almost a little counterintuitive, I think, than most people realize.
Right. Yeah. So you need to be thinking more systematically of how you do more with less down market, which is going to take more focus from robots, I think, initially.
And you mentioned AI as part of that and a huge, huge necessity for an AI strategy and where we see a lot of companies trying to jump through is to actually have a data strategy and data foundation in place. How are you building your AI?
Tessa Whittaker: (23:08.514)
How do you see AI strategy at Zoom Invo? Well, I could speak at least to how we’re thinking about it from a rev-off’s perspective. I think, you know, incredibly lucky to be at Zoom Invo because we have the data. And like you said, like you need to have a data strategy in order to have an AI strategy. And you can’t just build AI agents on top of your CRM. So your CRM data is likely very dirty. It doesn’t have your total addressable market in it.
And so to think, like, okay, I’m just gonna go out and get an AISDR and stick it on top of my CRM data, like, that’s never going to work and it’s not ever going to scale. And so, being incredibly fortunate to be in this position where we had this virtual data layer, we have that first party, third party data, is that from a robots perspective, not only am I thinking about how my team is operating, but when I think about innovating in the go-to-market,
There’s so much that we can do that’s already readily available to us to continually transform how we’re executing in the go-to-market by thinking through where are there manual steps or places that we’re asking sellers or sales development to do things that we can actually automate and then pull in our data and surface to them at the exactly the right time in order for them to execute and operate and do their jobs as efficiently as possible.
I guess one of the most critical parts, having built out a scaled system, usually you run into a lot of hiccups along the way. so everybody tries to learn from somebody tensed up ahead and you are tensed up.
ahead.
Sophie Buonassisi: (24:50.708)
What are the learnings from scaling a revenue organization that you’ve had? That’s like one area. We don’t have to do it.
Yeah, I think it’s just like, it’s funny cause like I haven’t that. mean, this is the gap. I haven’t scaled Rob OBS. I I came in when I came into zoom info, there was a lot that we had to re-architect to scale. I think, you you, think a lot about how do you build things to scale from the start, but at the same time, if you’re in a hyper growth startup, you’re just building as fast as you can. Yeah. Thinking about.
you know, are there ways that I’m going to build this thing that’s not going to just support five sellers, it’s going to support 200 sellers. Like, I don’t know if you’re thinking about that at that state. You’re in survival mode. And it’s interesting when we think about what do rev ops teams look like at a startup first, what do they look like at a company like Zoom Info? Yeah. Is that at a startup, your rev ops team is wearing 20 different hats.
No, I you’re daughter of a b-
Tessa Whittaker: (25:54.926)
So who’s taking the requirements or talking to the business or making strategic decisions might be the same person. Who’s your Salesforce admin? And so, yes, it’s incredibly important to invest in rev ops early on, but the people that you’re investing in are wearing 15 different hats. Yeah. And so when I think about being at a company that is up market, we’re selling into the enterprise, we’re currently re-architecting our revenue operations, our processes, and our systems, and our workflows to support
a larger organization that is going to be built to scale. There’s a lot that I’m redoing that I sit there and I go, well, why did we do it that way in the first place? But who am I to judge when you’re growing like a rocket ship, which Zoom Info did, they were building as fast as they so I think it is your job when you come into a revenue operations job at a company that is the size of Zoom Info to say, here is
what our tech stack looks like. Here are all of our processes and our systems. And kind of doing a complete audit of that and saying, okay, yes, from our tech stack, you know, where is their duplication? Where is their consolidation opportunities? Where are their systems that we have? Maybe they’re not best in class anymore and we need to look at that renewal and bring in someone new and, you know, rip that out and replace. Like you go through all of those motions.
But giving advice to someone who’s in that hyper growth early stage of what should you be thinking about now that you would want to think about when you’re where I am. I actually think that it’s a completely different mindset of what you’re building. But it’s been really fun. mean, we’re going to be at the end of this year, we’ll have re-architected almost all of our revenue tech stack, which has been really exciting. We’ve done
some really incredible rip and replace of some systems. And we’re now looking across every single process that supports the go-to-market. And we’ve audited that. And we said, OK, where is manual processes? Where are there automated processes? Where do we need to take manual processes and make them automated? And then where can we actually build in these AI workflows? And so that is something that I think every
Tessa Whittaker: (28:18.572)
rev ops person is going through right now at a larger company is basically this audit and then mapping of where can we actually start with AI and what will be the most impactful of use cases.
Mm-hmm. Hey, one quick thing. If you like what you’re hearing here, you should check out the product market fit show hosted by Pablo Srugo of Mistral VC, where top founders share exactly how they found product market fit. It’s one of the best podcasts for early stage founders going from zero to one. Just search the product market fit show. And where are you thinking about it in rebops? Where has been the most impactful place to start? Yeah, was.
Check the show notes.
Tessa Whittaker: (28:55.32)
So what’s interesting, and I talk about this, Ashley, in my talk at the Pavilion Conference. Can’t wait. But I talk about how I get questions all the time from different operators about what were your top 10 use cases, et cetera, or where should I start? My ELT is asking me. And the very first thing that I did was I turned it around to my own team. And I said, obviously, we’re fielding inbound requests from
our leaders right now on different AI workflows and we are supporting all of those things. But I knew that the evolution of the speed of which we are going to be expected to work was only going to continue to increase. And so it was going to be really critical that we were able to work as quickly as possible. So how do I take a team that supports the go-to-market and make them completely AI first? Right?
You know, how a typical rev ops team might work is they get a Slack or a call or a text message or 30 of those things all at the same time from the business asking for something to make a change or to support this thing or pull this report or change this workflow or whatever it is. And before it was just all very manual. So you might get on a call with the business and then you ask them a bunch of questions and they might not know those questions. And then you have three or four more calls and all of a sudden you’re pulling people.
from the business, and then you’re building out requirements, and then you’re meeting and grooming those requirements with the technical resources, and then you might go back to the business with questions. And it’s this very manual thing that all of sudden one request from the business might be 10 or 15 hours of work. And so we actually built out an agent that intakes now all the requests from the business. And so when someone comes to us and they need something from anywhere in the business, the agent starts asking them a series of questions.
And in a single interaction, we get the requirements. We understand what they’re trying to achieve. We actually ask them questions that then allow us to, or that agent to assess where does it fall on a priority standpoint? Like how would we even prioritize this? And at the end of it, you have full requirements, the groom for the technical team ready to go and sprint with a prioritization score where it should actually fall. So that, you know, sounds so simple, but if you have
Tessa Whittaker: (31:19.438)
30 rev ops people and they’re all spending five or 10 hours on sometimes one single intake. Yeah, dropping about hundreds or thousands of hours of work.
That’s not simple at all. That’s a ton of work and you’re also consolidating that you get into now one system. Everybody’s going directly to the agent now.
all the requests. And so, yeah, so we’re sending them directly to the agent. And then I think prioritization, it sounds so simple, like prioritization. Why is that something that, you know, rev ops people are constantly asking about? But like when I go out and talk to rev ops folks, besides AI, the number one question I get is how do you guys prioritize your work? Because it’s such a problem because I think historically you work on the things that
the people in the business are the loudest about, or whoever is shouting the loudest gets their work done first, which isn’t necessarily the things that are most important to move the business forward. And so that’s really helped us support that. And then in terms of where we’re starting with the business, it’s where are those really manual tasks that we know that sales or sales development we’re doing and how do we make it?
really simple for them to execute and do their jobs and spend as much time as possible with customers, which we know is so important when you’re going up market and in general, enterprise relationships are everything. What are the most manual things or the most time consuming things that your sellers are doing and starting there and making it easy for them to operate is, I think, how we’ve started to prioritize where we’re leveraging AI.
Sophie Buonassisi: (32:53.88)
Very cool. I mean, that’s incredible. You guys have done a phenomenal job of not only shifting the impact that you have on other organizations, AI forward, I didn’t even realize the extent to which you’d optimize internally. And with your outward strategy, one would assume that you are doing it internally, but it’s so interesting to hear the details that you’re actually building out internally.
It’s interesting, I think I made a lot of mistakes when I was trying to figure out how to make my organization AI first. I think six months ago it was like, guys, if you don’t start thinking AI first, like you had all our jobs in a year, like the fear and tally with the threat. Yeah, like, and that certainly wasn’t working. And then I did things around like, all right, we’re gonna have contests where like you take courses or you do this thing and you can like win prizes. And that was like kind of cheesy and didn’t really work either. But I was sitting,
you know, in this situation where I just wasn’t seeing everyone across the DevOps organization adopt AI fast enough, or some people were really scared about it or didn’t really know where to start. And so it was really fortunate. So ZI actually built an internal chat where at first like similar, would go to GBT, you go in and you can ask it questions, but this was really great because it was secure and integrated with different systems internally and in our data, et cetera.
And then we got the ability to build out our own agents. And so now anyone at Zoom Info can build their own agent to solve real go-to-market challenges. And so we have like hundreds and hundreds of agents that anyone from a sales development representative in SCR can build to people on my team. And so that was really great because we just made it really effortless to start getting hands-on with AI. And then two weeks ago, I actually had an agent hackathon with my team where every single person
had to go through this presentation where they built out an agent to support a real go-to-market challenge and then presented it. And that was really the turning point where people saw how they could really get creative with AI. Yeah. And I think the barrier to entry before was, know, I can’t, how do I even begin to build with AI? How do I even build an agent? They couldn’t start to get creative. And so one of the things that Zoom Info has done such a good job of,
Tessa Whittaker: (35:12.192)
is how do we allow operators to get creative again by taking away that barrier to entry of the more technical elements or challenges that maybe they had before and allowing them to just really be strategic and create for the first time. And not only have we done that, obviously, internally, like I’m talking about with ZI Chat, but we’re doing that again with our product. And GoToMarket Studio is an example of that, being able to actually just be creative and create and execute for the first time without
begging for a technical resource to support.
incredible. And now you’ve got reps and individuals creating their own agents within your ecosystem.
Well, not all are created equal, they’re getting hands on. But you can see the most eased agents, and it is really helping people.
There is the accountability in terms of the guilt. See, everybody else on the leaderboard. Absolutely. How do you avoid technical debt around agents? Say you’ve got an entire organization that can create their own agents. How do you not end up with thousands of agents and then only a handful are used?
Tessa Whittaker: (36:08.984)
Yeah.
Tessa Whittaker: (36:12.44)
So let’s.
Tessa Whittaker: (36:20.588)
getting that’s a really great question that I don’t have the answer to. Really? No, I think right now I think it’s, you know, how do we get people hands on? How do we get them creating? Yeah, let’s see what’s working. What’s not working. think naturally you see by the adoption, the ones that are better built. And I think, you know, driving people to it’s not driving people to, but it’s actually instead it’s
We might be too early.
Tessa Whittaker: (36:47.68)
looking at the ones that are, actually making the most impact and then taking those and either building them out further or continuing to iterate on those or actually building them into the standard sales process is probably what we’ll see happen first. And so if there’s three or four or five or 15 that are being used all the time, how do we actually make that a part of the standard way that we’re operating? And so I think first is,
Let’s get everyone hands on. Let’s see what people create and then let’s see what’s working. And then let’s pull that into the standardized playbook and make sure everyone is leveraging that. But right now I think we’re just in that really cool ideate, move fast, execute, see what’s making an impact. And then from there we can build that into this sales playbook.
and you really systemize it around that. It’s cool. It almost feels like a democratization of creation of the system where we used to have managers that created the systems and passed it along to teams. And now it’s almost made that so horizontal where anyone can create an experimental agent, gauge performance, and then bake it into the process now. So they’re not mere suggestions. Like you skipped the suggestion step.
suggestion step and just jumped right to execution, right, and enabled everyone to execute with your model, right, which is which is
Really exciting. it’s really exciting. You know, I think that what one of the things that I love about AI is I do believe that it is and I like that word like democratization. Like it’s this, it’s allowing anyone who is an operator regardless of how technical they are to be able to execute. Whereas I think before, you know, you were more reliant.
Tessa Whittaker: (38:38.606)
on different technical teams or technical resources or in a queue maybe with engineering to get something done. And now it allows you, even if you aren’t the most technical operator, to execute and create faster than ever before. And I think what’s interesting, you know, I grew up at Salesforce. Yeah, it was just a very big company. I started as like, I don’t know, 10,000.
and by the time I left it was 70,000 people. And while I stepped into ZoomInfo and I was running a team that was very technical, and I did spend a lot of time, you know, really focusing on how do I up-level myself and become more technical and making sure that I am very hands-on. I think the best operators are both hands-on and really good leaders. I never wanted to just be a leaders leader, and so always really pushed myself and continue to push myself every day.
to be really hands-on, but there were certainly things that I wasn’t hands-on before or different technical background I did not have that maybe other RevOps folks did or have that I didn’t. And so I think that for me, AI has been a great equalizer because I leaned into that. And I said, I can know AI or execute with AI or think AI first faster or before anyone else. And so that has become my technical background.
And even though I didn’t come up as a Salesforce admin or, you know, some sort of engineer, I feel like it’s been an equalizer for me to be truly technical and a DevOps leader innovating in my role.
It’s really level set the playing field.
Tessa Whittaker: (40:19.222)
Yeah, for everybody. think so. And I think we’re thinking about robots now and this concept of the rise of the go-to-market architect. And we’re moving from this really reactive role that we had before to being really proactive and more strategic. And I think AI has given us time back in the sense that we’re not doing the manual things that we were doing before, but it has allowed us to look holistically at the go-to-market and say, OK, what are the things that we want to innovate on or change?
or move on faster than before, and AI has allowed us to do that. Yeah.
Definitely. Entirely, entirely changed everything. Changed everything. Truly, truly. I love it. And how are you learning? You know, we talked about your operating system that you have in part because it sounds like that has been a huge part of just the way you built overall, but now out of necessity when you’re super busy, how do you have time to learn about AI and overall keep up to date with all the changes?
Yeah.
Just.
Tessa Whittaker: (41:18.742)
Yeah, you know, think the two things, maybe the three things that help the most. think one is just community, which seems pretty simple, but I surround myself with a ton of Redbox people. Yeah, I probably have three or four WhatsApps or text iMessage groups with my peers and we’re talking all the time. So what are you doing internally from an innovation standpoint?
What demos have you taken lately? Is there anything that you’re adding to your tech stack? Is there anything you’re replacing in your tech stack? You know, just really understanding what are the things day to day that they’re doing or thinking about or working on. I think that’s really important. If you’re a rev ops person and you’re not talking to other operators, I would say it’s a big miss because I think I’m ahead or I think I’m doing really well. And then I talked to one of my peers.
And I’ll go, my gosh, you’re doing that. Like that’s such a great idea. That’s awesome. Like I’m going to steal that. I’m going to do that too. But it’s always like pushing me to continue to innovate or look ahead. And I think your peers are a good benchmark for that. I think the second is just, I take like demos and actually seeing what people are building. And I think I’m so inspired when I’m seeing the difference.
things that are coming up or AI solutions. And I think as a rev ops leader, you spend a time, lot of time thinking about, this something I’m going to buy versus build? And you’re not going to know what you’re building unless you’re at least looking or exploring what you could buy. And so making sure that you’re spending time really understanding what’s being built. And then I think the third is probably just talking to your customers when you understand what challenges they have and you understand what they’re trying to solve for.
it allows you to think, okay, is that something that I can solve or is that something that I can build? And I think that helps you also creatively as well. Maybe there’s four. And then I think just getting hands on, like you have to, like me building my own agents and getting into different systems and tinkering as well. think you have to be hands on and if you’re not, then you’re just gonna fall behind.
Sophie Buonassisi: (43:31.51)
Yeah, simply put. then go to market. mean, tech modes have declined, right? Go to market really is your differentiator. And a huge part of that is not only your strategy, but your execution. And I think AI is such a cool moment because it shines the light on execution. Right. And it forces everyone to just continuously up-level it and do that. I love it. And what about more on the book side? So let’s say AI, but are there any favorite kind of books you’ve had that have been really impactful over your career?
Gosh. So six months ago, Ross Rich, his CEO of Accord, sat down on your book. Six months ago, it might’ve been for Christmas. I don’t know. It’s like, maybe it was around the holidays, but he sent me The Elchemist, which I had never read before. And I don’t think there’s been a single book in my life that has been more impactful. I think about it every single day. Wow.
Always lovely to get. You’re out of-
Tessa Whittaker: (44:30.026)
Every single day. Yeah. This idea that you’re going on this journey through your life, you have this like life mission or you’re going on this adventure. Yeah. how, you know, as you move forward or as you progress or as you go along this journey, there’s times where you get really incredibly comfortable and you’re comfortable because where you are in your life is better than you ever imagined it could be or it’s ever been before. And so you don’t…
think about maybe moving forward or making more progress. And I’ve always said, you know, if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing. And so in this book, he has these moments where he thinks like, I have more than I could ever wanted. Like, why would I keep going? Like, why don’t I stay here? But it’s like, you can always go back. You can always go back. And so I just love that book so much because it’s about always making progress and being OK with taking risks and being OK with maybe leaving.
what you thought was really great behind, because you can always go back, but you still have to go on this adventure, this journey. And I probably talk about that book, I don’t know, several times a week with folks, if you haven’t.
not read it so I am I’m going to and we’ll drop it in the show notice forever and yeah
I read it on the plane, on a plane. I think I cried through half of it and then I gave it to the guy sitting next to me.
Sophie Buonassisi: (45:52.62)
Yeah, they plan outside.
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Sorry for giving it away. Yeah, there we go. We won’t tell him. But no, that’s very cool. think it’s too often we think about an end state and often it is not an end state. It’s actually about the evolution, the continuous growth as opposed to reaching that end state. And it’s the interesting realization that a lot of people have intact too once they’ve usually built and sold a company successfully is you reflect back and realize
there’s no actual mountain top. It’s all just entire growth and progression or as some people like to reference from the book and there’s two mountains and two peaks and so forth and the other one’s always in the distance.
Yeah, I think it’s good. I really try to reframe when I start to feel, yeah, comfortable or anxious or, you know, that feeling that you get when you’re about to do something that you’ve never done before. this is good. Like, this is this, it’s good that you’re feeling this way because it means that you’re growing. And so I really anchored in that.
So growth is one of your five in your notion board. Or however people want to position it if you want to replicate type of growth.
Tessa Whittaker: (47:06.104)
Hahaha
Tessa Whittaker: (47:10.926)
It’s dumb. Frozey would kind of do across all of them, but I think… Okay. Growth, kind of almost put in a category all on its own.
Yeah, and is that mostly qualitative in nature then around you self-reflecting and mapping growth progress or how do you actually quantify your goals around growth based on your learnings from the alchemist now?
Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I think growth to me is just progress. I think growth isn’t just like you said, climbing a mountain. Growth comes from really deep valleys or making mistakes or things you try where you fail or maybe you try and you’re successful. So I think growth to me, when I think about setting goals about growth, it’s doing things that make me uncomfortable or maybe that I’ve never done before or the things that
you know, I don’t necessarily want to do, but I know are important to push me forward and give me experiences that I’ve never had before. Interesting, I would say that the number one thing that’s shifted recently for me and in my life that I never felt before, but it’s been incredibly liberating is I don’t think I’m afraid to fail anymore.
Tessa Whittaker: (48:27.586)
No, I think I spent so much of my life trying to prove something to somebody. And now all I want to do is prove things to myself. And I’m not competitive with anyone but myself. And I think that’s been really motivating for me. But then now just saying like, I’m never going to, I’m never going to be afraid if something doesn’t work out. I’m never going to be afraid of failing what I’m most
afraid about is never trying. Yes. And I think when you finally get there, it’s like the most liberating thing in the world.
That is amazing and beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And these are words that surround the systems. We’ve talked a lot about systems now, but it’s like the bigger why of what detailed the system. yeah, exactly, the moments around it. think Payal Kadakia, I don’t know if she was necessarily the first one, but she definitely spoke a lot to it around fear and kind of failure. It’s just a data point. And so it’s simply a data point if you’re not hitting that point.
Why?
Sophie Buonassisi: (49:34.39)
then you’re not trying hard enough. And I spent a lot of time in conversion optimization, which was one of the most valuable lessons around failure, because truly failure is good. You want to fail, and you want to learn from it. But it is a failure if you are hitting experiments, and you’re optimizing, you’re trying to improve your revenue and your funnel, but you’re not learning from it. So you’re either documental learning or you are failing. And that’s the real failure.
So your system to actually document it is really valuable and interesting for people. Absolutely. I love it. Well, thank you. This has been incredibly, incredibly valuable, Tessa. You’ve got the marathon coming up. That’s the first for you talking about heros. You’re running a marathon as well. So I am. However, I would say my systems aren’t as diligent as yours. I’m running a couple of times a week, a little bit less than yourself. So I follow around with her.
So.
Tessa Whittaker: (50:15.927)
and you
Sophie Buonassisi: (50:28.494)
So I will make sure to send you notes. There you go. Send me bumps. Not fast enough or anything. It’ll be a lot of fun. I’m excited for you. I’m excited to track your whole journey throughout it. Absolutely. Thank you.
Make sure you vote.
Tessa Whittaker: (50:40.117)
Well, thank you so much for having me.
