GTM Science - A show for GTM and RevOps leaders

Jessica Robertson is 11 months into her first CRO role and she's building a go-to-market engine around something most revenue leaders talk about but never operationalize: relationships. After scaling Accessibly from under $10M to $50M as VP of Sales, she watched the outbound playbook she'd relied on for years stop working. The 1:1 capacity math that used to be predictable fell apart, and no amount of headcount fixed it. So she made the jump to CRO at an early-stage startup to build a GTM motion from scratch that treats existing relationships as a real revenue channel. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Jessica Robertson, CRO of Orb, for a conversation on what it looks like to build a relationship-led GTM engine from zero, the culture shock of going from a scaled org back to startup basics, how she uses network mapping to turn existing customers into new pipeline, why her curated dinner events convert when most events don't, and what she's learned about navigating sales and CS misalignment as the person who owns both. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: USC Frameworks 00:36 - Intro to Jessica Robertson and Orb06:06 - From SDR to VP of Sales to first-time CRO07:26 - Why she left a $50M org for a startup12:09 - The culture shock of going back to ICP basics17:05 - How relationship mapping actually works in practice23:48 - Using your own product to build pipeline29:14 - The GTM motions driving Orb's growth31:19 - Why their curated events convert when most don't36:09 - Tripling revenue as a year-two goal42:41 - Advisors: Warren Zena and Bridget Winston47:41 - Navigating sales and CS misalignment as the CRO _______________________________________________________________GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH● Website● LinkedIn● TikTok

Every CRO has been here: you ask your ops team for a read on the pipeline and the numbers come back looking reasonable on the surface. But then you dig in and one rep is sitting at an 85% close rate while another is at 10%. Half the pipeline is zombie deals past twice the average sales cycle that nobody wants to mark as lost. The blended metrics look passable, but they're masking what's actually happening. And when your annual plan, your hiring decisions, and your board forecast are all built on top of that data, you're flying blind. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert break down how CROs and GTM Ops should actually analyze revenue metrics, starting with why most reporting is useless until the process underneath it is fixed. The conversation covers the basic questions that uncover more than any dashboard, how to read your funnel from right to left to find the real bottleneck, how ZoomInfo cut 4,000 leads and made more revenue with the remaining 2,000, and why your annual plan is only as good as the data it's built on. Resources mentioned in this episode: USC Frameworks GTM Efficiency Pyramid Framework 02:38 - Why your pipeline report never tells the full story06:45 - Zombie deals and the 2x sales cycle test08:46 - One rep at 10%, another at 85%11:32 - The marginal gains philosophy for GTM15:05 - Give your Rev Ops team protected time16:42 - The GTM Efficiency Pyramid foundation20:17 - Why CS belongs in the ICP conversation24:38 - Segmenting data to find hidden conversion gaps27:20 - Reading your funnel right to left29:14 - Annual planning on bad data33:49 - Pipeline generation isn't always the real problem39:23 - Bad leads or bad follow-up: how to test it43:27 - ZoomInfo cut 4,000 leads and made more money45:34 - Where to set the MQL qualification bar_______________________________________________________________GTM STRATEGY, GROWTH PLANNING, & REVOPS SERVICES● Website● LinkedIn● TikTok

This episode is a guest appearance by Eddie Reynolds, CEO of Union Square Consulting, on the FP&A Today podcast. Follow the FP&A Today Podcast on Spotify here and Apple Podcasts here.Eddie opens up about the often-fraught relationship between CFOs and CROs, drawing on his journey from banking and private equity to account executive at Salesforce, where the company forecast within 5% accuracy despite 30%+ growth. The conversation tackles why CFOs struggle to trust CRM pipelines, what breaks when companies hit $50-100M in revenue, how FP&A and CROs should work together on go-to-market strategy, the problems with LTV to CAC ratio in SaaS, and how bottoms-up annual planning should actually work between finance and revenue teams.Resources mentioned in this episode:GTM Efficiency Pyramid FrameworkOutbound Efficiency Framework