Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations | Martech Leader | Speaker

Author and speaker. Co-host of the Humans of Martech Podcast.

Subscribe to the Marketing Operations Leader newsletter for MOPs strategies and insights every week: https://darrellalfonso.substack.com/

Highlights: 
- Ranked as one of the Top Marketers in the US by Propolis 2022
- Named one of the "Top Martech Marketers to Follow" 2020 by Martech Alliance 
- Keynote speaker for Martech Conference and Get Stacked B2B Marketing Conference 2021
- Awarded Fearless Marketer 2018 
- Marketo Champion 2018 and 2019 
- VP of Communications American Marketing Association - 2017-2019
- Marketo User Group Leader 2017-2019
- Leading Program Manager for Connect@Amazon (35,000 member Amazon organization)
- Frequent Martech Speaker and Author 
- Marketo and Salesforce Certified 

Posts are my own and do not reflect the views of my current or former employers.

Darrell Alfonso

Acquire and expand customers quicker, cheaper, and for longer | Coaches B2B scale-ups scale more efficiently and effectively through proven frameworks | Organizing the MarTech World Forum London 2024

If your board or investors ask simple revenue questions and three people disappear into Excel, we need to talk.

Your forecast sounds confident on Monday. By Thursday, reality disagrees, and no one can explain why.
You spend more time arguing about stages than coaching deals. 
Deals do not die in your CRM. They just quietly age out while everyone watches.

The heroics that got you here are now the bottleneck. You have 15 dashboards, forecast theatre instead of truth, and a revenue engine leaking cash at invisible handoff points.

You are not bad at this. The system is.

I help €20 to 100M B2B SaaS scale-ups turn scattered data and forecast theatre into a revenue engine you can actually steer. Within 90 days. Without a reorg, new tools, or hiring a full-time VP RevOps.

Your RevOps team owns the system when I leave. I bring the pattern. They keep it running.

We start with a fast 4-part maturity scan to find the real constraint. Then we install three structures:
→ One-page strategy linking goals to the programs that actually move pipeline, win rates, and NRR.
→ One Revenue Room where metrics, risks, and decisions live in one view. No more "marketing numbers" vs "sales numbers." Just the number.
→ One operating cadence that replaces updates with decisions. If we are not making decisions, we are just having expensive coffee.

When it works, you explain where pipeline is healthy, where it is leaking, and how you are fixing it in 10 minutes flat. You get the headspace to think 3 years ahead, not 3 hours behind.

I am Rutger Katz, Fractional VP of RevOps.
Most RevOps people grew up in the growth bubble. They know how to spend money. I spent 15 years architecting efficient growth, so I know how to stop wasting money.

At one tech company, I uncovered €1M in unseen upsell opportunities. 
At Relay42, I rebuilt onboarding and adoption to move NRR.

Stop drifting. Start steering.
Revenue Engine Checkup in Featured. 10 minutes.
Or DM me "CHECKUP" for the questions directly.

I also speak/podcast guest on strategic RevOps, neurodivergence in leadership, and scaling to 100M ARR. 
Check www.neontriforce.com/speaking for more

Rutger Katz

I hate lead magnets. I'm also terrible at sharing files.
 
I've spent a year collecting RevOps resources, talking to ChatGPT/Claude, and formulating proven frameworks I applied the last 15 years. I extracted that in a set of Claude skills specifically for RevOps and GTM work. 

Not generic prompts. 

Skills with real methodology baked in: SPICED qualification, forecasting frameworks, HubSpot implementation patterns, change management, crisis triage, GTM comp design.
 
25 skills. 8,333 lines. Free.
 
But the more interesting thing is how they work.
 
Most people use Claude with structured prompts. "Act as a senior RevOps leader. Here is the context. Here is what I need. Format it like this." Every single time.
 
Skills are different. You upload the file to a Claude Project once. Claude reads it as background knowledge. From that point, every conversation in that project runs on the skill automatically. Claude knows which frameworks to use, which questions to ask, what to watch out for.
 
You stop prompting. You just ask questions or give assignments.
 
↳ "Why is our forecast always wrong?" 
↳ "Help me build a change management plan for this CRM migration." 
↳ "Our pipeline coverage looks fine but we keep missing. Where's the leak?"
 
Claude responds like a specialist, not a generalist.
 
Six skills stayed private. Those have client diagnostic and proposal methodology in them that people pay for.
 
The other 25 are yours.
Free (for now).
 
Comment or DM IHateLeadMagnets 
(or something else so that I can see you want it).
Put your hand up in whatever way you like, I'll send you the ZIP.

AI-native revenue engines for €15–150M B2B SaaS | Fractional VP of RevOps | Replacing spreadsheets and gut feel with compounding systems in 90 days | Double Daughter Dad

A simple new direction turns into seven things RevOps now has to rebuild.
 
Sandy Robinson, M.Ed. put words to it in Pavilion's RevOps School this week. I've seen it across enough clients to know it's not an exception. It's the pattern.
 
Leadership makes a call. New segment. Going upmarket. ICP shift. Motion change from inbound to ABM. 

It sounds like one decision. A direction. A slide in a deck.
 
By the time it reaches RevOps, it's something else entirely.
 
↳ ICP changes. Every targeting criteria, every account list, every scoring model needs rethinking. 
↳ Process changes. Qualification methods built for the old motion don't fit the new one. Handoffs break. Playbooks are wrong. 
↳ Tooling changes. Sequences, automations, configurations. Nothing carries over cleanly. All of it needs rebuilding. 
↳ Data definitions change. What does qualified mean now? What's a good fit? What does the funnel even look like?
 
Nedap is a good example of the opposite. They understand the size of what they're taking on. They want to map it properly before they start moving. That's not caution. That's how you avoid getting buried.

They scoped change across technology, data, process, upskilling, kpis and more. A big program, but it will stick.
 
The younger scale-ups I've worked with often hit this mid-execution. Three months in, RevOps is buried. Not because they're slow. Because nobody showed them what was coming.
 
The fix isn't complicated. Bring RevOps into the strategic conversation before the announcement. Not after. Not to slow it down. To map the avalanche while there's still time to prepare.
 
One decision at the top. Everything moves underneath. They should probably know it's coming.

I stopped writing long AI prompts. Built skills instead. The output quality jumped.

Next week I'm releasing a free GTM skill set for Claude. The skill carries the structure, the frameworks, the context. You describe what you need. It already knows how to think about it.

The RevOps set I built:
↳ RevOps Strategy
↳ RevOps Diagnostic
↳ RevOps Crisis
↳ RevOps Change Management
↳ RevOps Data Governance
↳ RevOps Forecasting
↳ RevOps Four-Capability Maturity Assessment
↳ RevOps HubSpot
↳ RevOps Metrics
↳ RevOps Tech Stack
↳ Revenue Operating Cadence
↳ CS Operations

Plus curated sales and marketing skills — GTM planning, compensation, sales methodology, marketing operations — so you have the full picture, not just one function.

No prompt engineering. The expertise is baked in.

There aren't any freely available RevOps skill sets out there right now. Feels like the right moment to change that.


Other things compounding quietly this week:

↳ 22 push-ups this yesterday. Was grinding through 10 a week ago. 1% improvements are invisible until they aren't.

↳ 60 sign-ups for the next Scale Up with HubSpot event. We were bracing to scrape to 50. Keep making the thing better, the numbers follow. Same principle, different context.

↳ EU roadshow conversations starting. Small, intimate events by design. Quality exchange only happens in a room where everyone knows everyone's name. The Dutch say massa is kassa. We respectfully disagree.

↳ If you're a sponsor whose ears just twitched, my DMs are open.


Drop a comment below if you want a heads-up when the skills drop next week. I'll come find you.

Governance is the most boring word in RevOps.
 
It is also the one thing that separates strategic partners from ticket-takers.
 
Everyone wants RevOps to be strategic. Few companies give RevOps the governance, decision rights, and process ownership that make strategic work possible.
 
I sat down with Jeff Ignacio on The RevOps Review Podcast to talk about what that shift actually looks like in practice.
 
We covered:
 
↳ What I think Winning by Design gets right about how revenue should work 
↳ Why governance and clear decision-making matter more as you scale 
↳ The real blockers when RevOps tries to move from tactical to strategic 
↳ Why customer adoption is a revenue conversation, not just a CS conversation 
↳ My Revenue Ops Maturity Model and where most scale-ups honestly sit on it
 
21 minutes. And we managed to talk about revenue operations without mentioning AI once.
 
Funny how much there is to sort out before the robots take over.
 
Link in comments.

Two companies deployed AI in their GTM. Same tools. 
One grew revenue per seller by 61%. 
The other lost 26%.

The difference wasn't the technology.

The 2026 Fullcast × Pavilion benchmark just made this painfully clear across 361,000 opportunities and 316 companies.

Group one focused on leverage. They closed fewer deals, moved upmarket, and used AI to sharpen qualification, routing, and deal prioritisation. 
R͟e͟s͟u͟l͟t͟: revenue per seller up 61%. Average deal size up 44%.

Group two focused on volume. They hired 38% more reps, flooded the top of funnel, and used AI to scale outreach and activity. 
R͟e͟s͟u͟l͟t͟: pipeline grew 72%. But revenue per seller dropped 26%. And deal sizes shrank.

Both groups adopted AI. Only one built the operating system to make it work.

And by operating system I don't mean software. I mean the decisions baked into how you run revenue: who you target, how deals qualify, what triggers action, and what gets ignored.

This is the pattern I keep seeing at scale-ups between €15M and €150M. The instinct when growth slows is to add volume: more reps, more pipe, more tools. The data (and my experience) says the opposite works: fewer, better-qualified deals with rules that enforce quality at every stage.
AI is an accelerant. It doesn't care what it accelerates.

→ Precise ICP, enforced stage gates, signal-based routing? AI compounds that.
→ Fuzzy targeting, no governance, activity-based KPIs? AI compounds that too. Faster.

Before you buy the next tool, ask one uncomfortable question:

Are the decisions underneath it worth accelerating?

📊 Data: Fullcast × Pavilion 2026 GTM Benchmark Report
h/t Guy Rubin

The worst feeling in SaaS:
 
Huge pipeline. Missed target. Again.
 
Here's the pattern I see with every founder past €5M ARR:
 
They're targeting €5M this quarter. 
They've got €20M in pipeline. 
They're converting 20%.
 
That's €4M. They miss.
 
So what's the reflex?
 
"We need more pipeline."
 
I've watched founders double down on this for 6 months straight. 
More outbound. More content. More events. 
The CRM looks like a crime scene. 
The sales team is drowning in demos they'll never close.
 
And conversion stays flat at 20%.
 
Because if your conversion is broken, more pipeline just means you're burning CAC faster on deals you'll never win.
 
It's like hiring more waiters when the kitchen's on fire. Everyone's very busy. Nothing's getting served.
 
𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀:
 
𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁, 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲.
 
That €20M is contaminated. Zombie deals. Wrong-fit ICPs. Opportunities your reps keep "nurturing" because killing feels like losing.
 
Cut it to €15M. Same target. Less noise.
 
Now you're converting 27% instead of 20%. Same €4M. Way less waste.
 
𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗽𝘂𝘀𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝟲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀.
 
Fix the handoffs. Sharpen the enablement. Give people clear next actions instead of dashboards they never open.
 
33% of €15M = €5M.
 
Target hit. Zero extra pipeline required.
 
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀. 
Not dashboards. Not Salesforce janitor work.
 
It turns pipeline chaos into a system that compounds.
 
Most founders skip it. They hire GTM Engineers and Clay gurus instead. Then wonder why two quarters later they're still missing the target with twice the CAC.
 
Same pattern every time:
 
They think it's a pipeline problem. It's a conversion problem. 
They think it's a people problem. It's a system problem.
 
If you're past €5M ARR and this feels familiar, there's a 10-minute diagnostic in my featured section Rutger Katz.
 
It shows you where your revenue is actually leaking and what not to touch yet.
 
If it's worth going deeper, we book 45 minutes and make it practical.

Move pipeline is not the answer, RevOps is

Most revenue architecture rollouts plateau at the same point.
 
Teams are enthusiastic. Bowtie gets mapped. SPICED gets trained. Early wins show up.
 
Then it stalls. Quietly.
 
It's almost never the framework.
 
What's missing sits underneath it. Two layers and one rare resource that most companies leave completely unprotected.
 
↳ Swipe through for the full breakdown.
 
The short version: Governance protects the investment. Enablement makes the new way of working stick. Champions carry both.
 
I've seen what happens when you lose them. Eight people driving a platform rollout at a bank. Strategy shifted. All eight scattered overnight. Two years of work, gone in a week.
 
If you're rolling out revenue architecture or any operating model across multiple teams, one question before you start:
 
What system protects this when priorities shift?
 
If you can't answer that, you're hoping it lands. And hope doesn't scale.

Change fails without governance and enablement

Suffering from success. I hate lead magnets. Made one anyway. Then spent an evening emailing .zip files to strangers.
 
Last week I posted "25 Claude Skills for RevOps & GTM." Built them because they didn't exist and I wanted them for client work. Posted them because other people probably need them too.
 
About 50 people responded.
 
LinkedIn doesn't allow .zip files in DMs. So I did the only logical thing: emailed them individually.
 
This morning, I built a resource page on Lovable. Took 30 minutes. Drop your email, get the files. I can add every free resource I build going forward.
 
One follow-up email goes out a week later: "Did any of it stick?"
 
Not to sell. To learn. The skills only get better if I know what's broken.
 
I build revenue systems for companies stuck doing things manually. Apparently, I needed a LinkedIn limitation to apply that to myself.
 
Link in first comment (which LinkedIn probably buries).

I was a terrible corporate employee.
 
Held back in school, not because I couldn't do it, but because it bored me. Tried five different study programmes before finishing. Six companies in 12 years (low for most salespeople). Failed spectacularly at project management. Frustrated every manager I worked for.
 
My brain has one setting: obsessed or checked out.
 
ADD means I can't tolerate noise. Broken processes, meetings without purpose, misaligned KPIs... My brain physically rejects them. In corporate that made me "difficult." In consulting, it became a diagnostic instrument.
 
Every role taught me what a broken system looks like from the inside:
 
→ At a marketing consultancy, five disciplines refused to collaborate because each had separate KPIs 
→ At a logistics company, three leadership changes produced zero improvement because the company's operating system never changed 
→ At a 100-person consultancy, I watched brilliant frameworks die because nobody installed the cadence to make them stick
 
I didn't collect these experiences on purpose. But now I walk into a company and within two weeks the patterns are screaming. Not because I'm brilliant (but it does help 😉).
 
Because I've been inside six versions of the same broken system.
 
What looked like a messy career was actually pattern recognition in training.
 
If you've ever felt like the wrong fit for the system, maybe the system was wrong, not you.

P.S. Guys, it's Women's Day, so grab a bouquet of flowers for your wife and shower her with love

Three people will describe your sales process. None of them are right.
 
The CEO describes the one they designed two years ago. 
The VP describes the one they trained on last quarter. 
The rep describes the one they follow when their manager is watching.
 
Ask what actually happens when push comes to shove: last week of the quarter, big deal on the line, pipeline review in two hours, and you get a fourth answer. From nobody, because nobody has looked.
 
I spend my first week sitting on sales calls. Not to understand the product. To see what reps actually do when it matters.
 
Then I open HubSpot.
 
Deals stuck in the same stage for 60 days. Missing qualification fields. Stages that do not reflect the conversation that actually happened. You can see the gap between what the process says and what people do. Right there in the deal records.
 
That gap is where revenue leaks. Not in the strategy deck. Not in the methodology training. In the space between what leadership thinks is happening and what reps actually do under pressure.
 
The first 90 days are not about building something new.
 
They are about making visible what is already there, standardising what works, and removing what does not.
 
Most companies try to fix what they think is broken. The ones that improve fix what is actually broken. That requires seeing it first.

Your pipeline just shrank. Congratulations. That is progress.
 
First thing I do in any engagement: kill deals. Zombie opportunities that have not moved in three months. Prospects who went dark after the demo. Deals sitting in late stage because nobody wanted to close them out and watch the coverage number drop.
 
Strip those out and the pipeline is €3M lighter.
 
The CRO panics. 


Understandable.
 
But here is what actually changed. The forecast is now honest. The conversion rate now reflects reality. The team stops spending cycles on deals that were never going to close and starts focusing on the ones that might.
 
Nobody asks about the ROI of that.
 
They ask about the ROI of the system, the process, the engagement. Fair question. But the ROI is not always a bigger number. Sometimes it is a smaller number you can actually trust.
 
Zombie deals made your pipeline look healthy right up until you missed. They made your conversion rate meaningless, your forecast unreliable, and your team's effort invisible, because effort spread across dead deals looks like activity without results.
 
Killing them does not cost you revenue. It just removes the illusion of it.
 
It gets worse though...


 
Strip out the zombies and you might discover your pipeline is not just dishonest. It is too small.
 
You were not over-covered. You were under-covered and did not know it because the dead deals were filling the gap.
 
Now you have a different problem to solve. A real one.
 
That is still progress. You cannot fix what you cannot see.

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The Battle

Darrell Alfonso

Rutger Katz

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The Battle

Darrell Alfonso

Rutger Katz

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Rutger Katz's LinkedIn Performance

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