GTM Operations Manager (Founding Team)

Overview

You'll wear two hats: building Aurasell's internal go-to-market operations stack and working directly with early customers to implement the product. This means configuring workflows in Aurasell's platform, designing automation, troubleshooting integrations, and sitting in on customer calls to understand how RevOps teams actually work. You're not just an admin - you're helping shape what the product becomes by being the first real user.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Seed ($30M raised from Menlo Ventures, Unusual Ventures, N47)

Size: 61 employees

Growth: Building founding GTM Ops team, hiring across Bay Area and East Coast

Market Position: Category creator - pitching "AI-native CRM" in a crowded space dominated by Salesforce, HubSpot. Competing against newer players like Attio, Clay, and the "future of CRM" narrative everyone's selling.

GTM Reality

Your Customers (Internal):

• Small sales team (probably 5-15 reps based on company size)
• Likely AEs doing full-cycle sales, maybe a few SDRs
• Leadership team that wants data but doesn't have dashboards yet

Your Customers (External):

• 3-5 early design partner customers
• Mid-market to enterprise companies (RevOps only exists at a certain scale)
• RevOps leaders who are frustrated with their current stack and willing to take a bet on a new platform

What "Implementation" Actually Means:

• Data migration from Salesforce/HubSpot (messy, always takes longer than expected)
• Building workflows and automation in Aurasell's platform
• Training their sales team on new processes
• Troubleshooting integrations when things break
• Weekly check-ins where you defend why the old system's problems still exist

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Salesforce (obviously), HubSpot, Attio, Clay (for prospecting), the "modern CRM" category that every VC-backed startup claims to be reinventing

How They Differentiate: "AI-native" positioning - not bolting AI onto an old system, but building from scratch with AI workflows at the core. Unified platform vs cobbling together 12 tools.

Common Objections: "Why not just use Salesforce + [AI tool]?" "We just migrated to HubSpot 8 months ago." "How mature is your platform really?" "What if you don't survive Series A?"

Win Themes: Simplicity, fewer tools in the stack, automation that actually works, not having to fight with Salesforce admins for 3 weeks to change a field.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Internal Ops (40%) | Customer Implementations (35%) | Product Feedback/Meetings (25%)

Key Activities

• Build Aurasell's Internal Stack: You're configuring the CRM, setting up lead routing, building reports, designing workflows - the same stuff you'd do at any company, except here the product is your own and half the features don't exist yet.

• Customer Implementations: You lead 2-3 active implementations at any time. This means scoping calls, data migration, configuration, training sessions, and a lot of Slack messages about "why isn't this syncing?"

• Product Feedback Loop: You're in customer calls hearing what's broken or missing. You translate that into tickets for engineering. You sit in product meetings advocating for what RevOps teams actually need vs what sounds cool.

• Documentation and Process: Writing runbooks, creating training materials, documenting how things work - both for internal team and for customers. Someone has to do it, and early-stage means that someone is you.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're Selling Unfinished Software: Customers will ask for features that don't exist yet. You'll have to manage expectations while also pushing product to build faster. Sometimes you'll promise something and engineering will deprioritize it.

• Customer Zero Means You Find All The Bugs: When something breaks internally, you're both the user impacted AND the person who has to fix it. You'll spend time in bug triage that you thought would go to strategy work.

• Context Switching: One hour you're debugging a webhook failure for a customer, next hour you're in a leadership meeting about pipeline forecasting models, then you're back to fixing your own CRM data because someone bulk-uploaded garbage.

• Early-Stage Chaos: Priorities shift. Roadmap changes. The thing you spent two weeks building might get deprecated. Leadership is still figuring out ICP and messaging, which affects how you design systems.

What Success Looks Like

• You have 3-5 reference customers running Aurasell in production and not churning
• Internal GTM team uses the product daily without major complaints
• You've built a library of reusable workflows/templates that speed up new implementations
• Product team actually ships features you requested based on customer/internal needs

Who You're Working With

Internally:

• David Winslow (Head of GTM Strategy and RevOps, your manager) - ex-Salesforce/AppDynamics/Coupa, knows enterprise GTM
• Sales team who will complain if the CRM is slow or workflows are clunky
• Product/Engineering team who you'll need to advocate to for ops features

Externally:

• RevOps leaders at design partner companies (probably Director/VP level)
• Their sales ops analysts who do the day-to-day work
• Occasionally their CRO when you're pitching a renewal or expansion

What They Care About:

• Internal team: Can I find my leads? Do my reports work? Is this faster than what we had?
• Customer RevOps leaders: Will this actually reduce our tool count? Can we migrate without breaking everything? Will your company still exist in 12 months?

Requirements

• 5+ years in RevOps or sales operations roles, ideally at a B2B SaaS company
• You've actually built CRM systems and workflows (not just maintained them) - Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar
• Experience with integrations and APIs (Zapier level is fine, but you need to understand how data flows)
• You've worked at a startup before and know what "figure it out" means
• Comfortable on customer calls - you'll be explaining technical concepts to non-technical buyers
• Bay Area or East Coast location (they want you in person semi-regularly)
• Willing to work in a 0→1 environment where half your job doesn't have a process yet