Watch the full conversation on YouTube
On the Revenue Creator Podcast, Lauren Hughes, VP of GTM Effectiveness at Justworks, walked me through how she rebuilt RevOps around customer outcomes instead of departments.
When she joined, a new account executive took 18 months to ramp. Her team has cut that to nine, doubled sales development pipeline with four fewer reps, and now runs revenue like a product. The full conversation is below.
What you’ll learn
How to organize RevOps around outcomes with pod leaders and builder operators
How an AI sidekick on sales calls helped cut new hire ramp from 18 months to nine
Why Justworks moved its outbound SDR team under GTM effectiveness
What to look for in a GTM engineer, and how to pay them
Why every tool in your stack needs an owner
Episode Highlights
02:39 - Organizing around customer outcomes, not silos
04:06 - Pod leaders and builder operators
05:27 - Rebuilding enablement around AI
07:00 - Specialists lift conversion 20%
07:58 - The AI sidekick that rides along on calls
10:17 - Buy, build, or partner
12:03 - Ramp time from 18 months to nine
15:17 - Solve, sell, or send
16:44 - Why outbound moved under GTM effectiveness
19:23 - 2x pipeline with four fewer reps
22:28 - External vs internal GTM engineers
25:42 - Paying GTM engineers on outcomes
27:49 - AI should create time, not just cut headcount
29:30 - Three promises to the sales floor
34:21 - Every tool needs an owner
Key Takeaways
1. Organize around outcomes, not departments
Justworks used to run RevOps the traditional way, with sales ops, partner ops and CS ops in their own lanes and marketing ops sitting elsewhere. Lauren reorganized the team around customer outcomes: new customer acquisition, expansion and support. Each outcome has a pod leader who owns the result, paired with builder operators. They know their part of the funnel and use AI to redesign the process from scratch rather than patch the old one. On enablement, she kept six of 18 people and hired AI-first enablement leads around them.
2. Put an AI sidekick on every sales call
When a Justworks specialist joins a deal, conversion goes up 20%. At small business volume, there aren't enough specialists to join every call. So her team built a sidekick that rides along on Zoom, hears the prospect's question and serves the rep the answer in real time. Off-the-shelf tools fell short and the in-house build stalled, so they co-built it with a partner. Her VP of sales calls it a heads-up display. It's part of why new hire ramp has gone from 18 months to nine, and the target is under six.
3. Cut the handoffs
One inbound deal could move from a qualifier to an AE to a specialist, with three to seven days lost at each handoff. Lauren's new model gives the first human three options. Solve the question and send the buyer back into the self-serve journey. Sell them the thing they came to buy. Or send them to an AE or specialist when the case needs it. Conversation intelligence data shows which questions come up most, so the journey can be tuned to each business.
4. Move outbound into GTM effectiveness
The outbound SDR team had lost two leaders and its productivity had stalled when Lauren asked to take it over. She rode along with all 35 reps, built an AE readiness program and AI outbound agents, and worked closely with the frontline managers. In the first quarter of this year, the team doubled both pipeline opportunities and pipeline ARR year over year, with four fewer people. She also promoted nine high performers out of sales development into AE, partner and RevOps roles.
5. Hire GTM engineers from the outside
Justworks hired two GTM engineers externally and moved two RevOps people into the role. The internal hires couldn't see past the process they already knew. The external hires looked at it fresh and asked why it worked that way at all. Today five external GTM engineers own the whole customer journey instead of one silo each. They take the tools reps build for themselves in Claude, productize them and roll them out to the floor. Their bonus is tied to outcomes they measure over several quarters, which keeps the team from shipping AI slop.
"We're running revenue like a product."
6. Every tool needs an owner
Before Lauren joined, Justworks bought tools vendors pitched and then left them unused. Her team now owns the GTM tech stack end to end. If nobody is assigned to a tool and the part of the journey it serves, it gets pulled. As she put it, "You can't just buy them and set them and forget them."
If you're enjoying these, reply and tell me how long it takes a new AE to ramp at your company.
Catch you next week,
Jared
P.S. Lauren is most active on LinkedIn and happy to connect. Also, always growing our RevGenius community; you can join here to follow along.
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