Category: Revenue Ops

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don’t hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team.
If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company’s positioning in different segments.
That’s especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It’s a live feedback loop marketers can’t get anywhere else.
Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other’s meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly.
Our guest today understands that better than most. He’s a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He’s known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance – something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach’s tone to get them back on track. 
And he doesn’t restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let’s go talk with Karl Ortmanns.

Listen to episode

Chapters/Timestamps

0:02:29 Navigating the Rollercoaster of Sales and Problem-Solving

0:04:29 Bridging the Gap Between Marketing Content and Sales Context

0:07:34 How External Shifts Impact Revenue and Strategy

0:10:09 Adapting to Digital-First Selling and New Tools

0:14:50 Readiness and Challenges When Moving Upmarket

0:18:34 Marketing and Sales: Listening and Collaborating for Growth

0:22:10 Optimizing Pricing and Positioning Through Market Insights

0:26:01 Leveraging Churn and Product Data for Improvement

0:27:56 The Collective Responsibility of Driving Company Revenue

0:31:39 Shortening Sales Ramps and Boosting Profitability

0:34:58 Humility and Transparency in Revenue Leadership Changes

0:39:52 Where to find Karl

Shownotes

Revenue Problem Solvers podcast

Karl on Linkedin

This is the third in our series on Revenue Operations.

Our guest grew up on the west coast and received his degree from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Over the course of his 20 year professional career, Vito Mazzarino has been both a company owner and an employee brought in to help with Marketing and Business Development. While doing that, he grew to love using automation to streamline marketing & sales processes. 

By the middle of the 2010s, he knew the automation tools well enough to implement them. He took this as a signal that he should make a change, so he moved to Montreal Quebec and started his own agency.  

Growth Geyser was born in 2018 to strategize and deploy automation that grows a company’s  customer base and  hits their sales targets. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Growth Geyser’s 17-point Lead Management Checklist for Small Business Owners (PDF)

Sales has been around forever. But how long have we had marketing? In North America, it’s the late 1800s and  early 1900s. 

You’d get an idea of what they were focused on by reading the journal of the US agricultural economics Bureau. In it, they chronicled the 1937 annual meeting the National Association of marketing officials (You may know it by its current name, the American Marketing Association). The proceedings were entirely about the marketing of… farm products. Producing and selling as many commodities as possible, to as many regions as possible.

Despite being in just one category, this assembly of academia and Industry was trying to formalize how this function would blend in with the other departments, like sales, within the average American business. Fast forward nearly a century, there seems to be a new framework on the horizon for how the marketing and sales functions should be organized – and it’s called Revenue Operations. The purpose of this four part series is to go inside businesses where it’s being used and listen to thought leaders who have written about it. 

For this first episode of the series, we going into the trenches with someone possessing a diverse blend of experience spanning Revenue Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Product, Lawrence Quan brings a holistic view of revenue to startups of all stages. 

He is Director, Growth Marketing with LTSE. He has also built growth teams at Rewind and led Growth Marketing at Clearco. On the side, Lawrence works with seed, Series A, and Series B SaaS companies to build and scale go-to-market engines.

 Listen to the various places he’s seen RevOps in organizations but wherever it sits, he stresses that it is a team sport. Hear how a revenue-focus gets infused into the Marketing Mix, and how the best marketing ideas don’t always come from marketing. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lawrence’s LinkedIn profile 

Rewind.io

Clearco

Gong