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Olga Traskova is VP of Revenue Operations at Birdeye, and she got there through marketing ops. Rare path. It shows in how she reads a funnel.
This year she took apart the marketing, sales, and CS ops silos inside her team and rebuilt around two functions: go-to-market engineers who build, and go-to-market operations, where everyone can run any stretch of the customer lifecycle.
What you’ll learn
Why she replaced three ops silos with two functions, and what go-to-market operations owns now
The three layers she checked before letting AI near the funnel, starting with whether the data could take it
Why a Claude skill sat untouched for weeks, then got adopted the day it became a button in Salesforce
How AI forecasting beat every other model in Q2, and the plan to hand it the forecast in 2027
Her two-tier deal desk, where 90% of the effort goes to enterprise and small deals close themselves inside a 20% discount guardrail
Episode Highlights
01:40 - Why RevOps leaders from marketing ops are built differently
04:04 - What was breaking before the reorg
05:25 - Data, then process, then talent
08:10 - Two functions: GTM engineers and GTM operations
11:04 - Ninety percent of the fields, then the stages
13:52 - The KPIs that did not move
17:03 - One Clay owner, ten people's enrichment
19:07 - AI fatigue and human in the lead
19:40 - The two-tier deal desk
25:04 - Manager judgment next to AI judgment
25:33 - AI forecasting beat every model in Q2
27:53 - The go-to-market hackathon
33:40 - The builds she killed
34:46 - The skill that became a button in Salesforce
36:38 - Her bets for next year
Key Takeaways
1. Three silos became two functions
Marketing ops, sales ops, and CS ops used to sit separately inside her team. Now there are go-to-market engineers, building agents and infrastructure, and go-to-market operations, where any person can pick up any project because they all know the path from lead to renewal.
2. Data, then process, then talent
AI on top of bad data exposes every piece of garbage already sitting in the CRM. She only started building once the team trusted the definitions behind MQL, SQL, and pipeline, and stage three had real entry and exit criteria.
3. Build where the work already happens
A Claude skill that generates proposal decks went unused while it lived outside Salesforce. She moved it to a button on the opportunity. Adoption followed immediately.
"The best AI workflow is for sellers when they don't even realize it's AI."
4. Same scoreboard, faster route to it
Forecasting accuracy, win rates, pipeline coverage, routing SLAs. Her words: she cannot reinvent a KPI just because there's a new tool in the toolbox.
5. One Clay owner runs what ten people did
Enrichment that took a team now runs through a single owner orchestrating the tools. She's honest about the catch: giving reps time back is easy to claim, and there's no clean answer yet for what the reps do with it.
6. Shipped without a home, it dies
Fancy dashboards and standalone reporting got deprecated because the CRM already had the data and the credits bought nothing. Whatever her team builds now needs a straight line to pipeline, win rate, forecast accuracy, or selling time.
Her bets on where the RevOps role lands next year are in the episode.
If you're enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you'd love to learn more about: GTM engineering, deal desk design, AI forecasting, org structure, anything.
Catch you next week,
Jared
P.S. Olga is most reachable on LinkedIn, so send her a message there. Also, always growing our RevGenius community; you can join here to follow along.
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Free and virtual. You'll leave knowing which parts of your motion are still worth defending.
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