Zapier’s Lindsay Rothlisberger talks bringing GTM engineering inside the RevOps team

Lindsay Rothlisberger has worn many hats during her six years at AI workflow automation company Zapier. She has gone from leading marketing ops and scaling the RevOps team, to the forefront of the company’s AI strategy as director of GTM innovation and revenue operations.

Rothlisberger sat down with Revenue Brew to discuss the shift in Zapier’s RevOps team and how GTM engineers play a role within it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you shift Zapier’s RevOps team from functional sites to funnel-focused groups?

We really wanted different members of the team to have ownership over specific metrics that drove growth and scale across the funnel. For example, we went back to the old ways of having someone dedicated to marketing and lead generation—making sure that leads were really high quality and that they were converting better. Then, someone focused on the mid-part of the funnel, like sales efficiency and productivity, someone focused on getting customers to value really quickly. We found that keeping that mapping to different parts of the funnel gave a lot more ownership and accountability within the team and prevented us from falling into the trap that a lot of RevOps teams do, which is we become ticket takers. We really wanted those folks to feel some connection to the part of revenue and the part of growth that they were ultimately supporting.

What has been the benefit of making this change?

We’re able to partner with the teams that we support. In marketing, we’re able to be a thought partner in terms of how to reach their pipeline goals, versus just waiting for them to make a request. It’s given us a more strategic role—being really tightly embedded within marketing, really aligned to the marketing strategy [and] the pipeline targets. They’re not just waiting for marketers to come with an ask, but they can proactively offer ways to increase lead quality. They are a partner in terms of their prioritization and their road map, so they can really work alongside marketing leadership to decide the priorities based on our revenue targets. I think being embedded within the function has helped them move faster, stay more aligned to revenue, and be more of a thought partner.

How does GTM engineering fit into your RevOps team?

Our revenue operations team has always needed to function like go-to-market engineers. The concepts are not new. About three years ago, everyone in RevOps really committed to figuring out how to use AI to do our jobs better…using AI to augment lead enrichment and qualification, using AI to facilitate better sales coaching, using AI to handle renewals autonomously in some cases. We really embraced AI as a core tool across all of RevOps. Seeing go-to-market engineering start to skyrocket in terms of it being a core focus was surprising to me at first. I was like, “We’re already doing this.” Most folks in go-to-market view go-to-market engineering as a specific focus on revenue growth. I think RevOps is a little bit torn sometimes because we’re responsible for scale, so we build systems and automation that helps sales and marketing scale.

We’ve been focused on scale for so long, and not as focused on growth. How do we find more leads? How do we increase conversion rates? We haven’t necessarily been tied to that, so I think that go-to-market engineering as a specialization really surged because RevOps teams weren’t necessarily focused on growth. At Zapier, we ended up hiring go-to-market engineers that were specifically focused on growth and outbound.

How do Zapier’s GTM engineers and marketers work uniquely to bring in outbound leads?

Members of the operation teams all use AI quite heavily in their jobs in building solutions. The go-to-market engineers—the way we distinguish them at Zapier—are very much focused on outbound, growth, enrichment, and generating incremental revenue. So we split the two. RevOps folks are focused on using AI solutions for productivity, scale, and conversion rates during the sales process. We have go-to-market engineers that sit in marketing right now and specifically focus on building agentic outbound programs. I harken it back to when product-led companies were experimenting with layering on sales outreach in running experiments and coming up with unique sales plays to try and use different enrichment mechanisms and data to validate new ways to drive incremental growth into the funnel. Our go-to-market engineering function is specifically focused there, but we use go-to-market engineering concepts throughout the entire funnel and [they’re] utilized by many people whose title isn’t necessarily go-to-market engineer.

Why do you think GTM engineering doesn’t necessarily live within RevOps teams across sales organizations?

It should live within RevOps teams. I think RevOps teams that get too focused on scale and efficiency, and not growth and revenue, are going to become less valuable over time. It’s important for both go-to-market engineers and revenue operations teams to work really closely together, because the tools and systems that we’re creating to drive growth need to complement and live alongside the tools and the systems that help us scale and create predictability. It’s just two sides of the same coin, and it’s important for it to be integrated and aligned.