What’s the secret to company scaling? According to Peter Ikladious, product-led growth pioneer and RevOps expert, it’s not about secrets or luck—it’s strategy.
Most companies talk a big game about growth, but few have the operational muscle to make it sustainable. That’s where Revenue Operations (RevOps) steps in.
In this episode of Go To Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Peter explains that RevOps drives efficient growth fast by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success. Think of it like a game of Snakes and Ladders: while others slide backward on outdated processes, RevOps leaders can empower GTM strategies to climb quickly toward scalable, repeatable success.
What makes RevOps so relevant right now? For Peter, it’s the realization that scaling is a formula, not a free-for-all. Growth used to be about throwing bodies at problems. It’s about building smarter systems that unlock revenue potential without burning out your team or your budget. The good news is that scaling has a reproducible formula that supports growth and transforms leaders’ thinking from a siloed approach to a coordinated RevOps model.
Learn how RevOps can provide the framework for disciplined, data-driven expansion—with no more guessing and no more gut feels—just aligned teams, clean data, and measurable progress. Because let’s face it. If you’re not thinking about how RevOps accelerates efficient growth for your business, you’re already falling behind.
Amy: First, I am delighted to hear that there is a repeatable formula and a playbook for scaling. So many companies, first of all, don’t get to product-market fit, but more companies lose their way once they have product-market fit and are trying to scale. What is one secret that you know about scaling that most people don’t do, and why are there so many companies that fail during this process?
Read more: RevOps Leaders Need a Marketing Ops Mindset
Peter: We have a framework called customer journey optimization. Whether someone is already a customer or still in the prospect stage, they have a journey. Let’s compare it to a game of Snakes and Ladders, for simplicity’s sake. The first square is when you want someone to start your journey, and the last square is when they’re an active customer.
If they land on snakes, they risk falling away from the journey or completely disappearing. But as practitioners, we help them put ladders in place to improve things, such as how to identify the right people, make sure that the steps are easier on the journey, ensure that the correct AE or SDR is speaking to the right person, and ensure that they’ve got the correct information.
These ladders help you bypass or jump over those snakes. We talk about best practices in B2B SaaS from someone who’s a free user or a trial user, assuming that there’s an online sign-up to a paid customer.
We say a benchmark is north of 40 to 60 percent, so if that’s the benchmark, how much lower are the rest? If you’re at the benchmark, you’re losing roughly half anyway. Those snakes are really aggressive; they’re going to steal at least half of the people coming in. So how do you get them? The magic is that there is no magic.
If you think of it as our Snakes and Ladders analogy, and you think about where you are going to put the ladders, then it changes the way you think about the technology. Now, it’s about cohesion and collaboration. It shapes the way you think about what your teams do. I no longer have a life cycle marketing manager who cares about one sequence. I now have a person accountable for the journey’s first branch. That means they’ve got to work with marketing and sales and RevOps and sales ops and marketing ops to make sure that’s actually built.
Then, the technology is already a solved problem. People now own tasks. But you’re also implementing automation. Those ladders aren’t someone calling up all the time. It’s automating facets. You’ve got a high volume at the beginning of your journey, so you want to automate as much as possible. Later in the journey, you may offer more of a white glove treatment instead of a self-service experience.
Read more: Why Seller Experience and Ops Skills Win in Vertical Markets
Amy: In keeping with the Snakes and Ladders analogy, what are the snakes? What are the pitfalls that make you drop down in that customer journey?
Peter: Early on in the journey, things like, how do you find your people? How do you find the audience–those we traditionally call your top funnel metrics? I haven’t been able to do messaging for the right audience. They’ve come to my web page or my site, and there’s too much noise on my website that doesn’t give a key focus, for instance. So, it’s conversion rate optimization, SEO, and classic paid media. Those are the tactics you can solve, the ladders you can build, so to speak, to avoid those snakes. Because those snakes are there, inhibiting what you get.
Amy: I love this analogy. You mentioned deciding whether to use a self-service or sales-led model. How can you determine what’s best for your business?
Peter: That’s a great question, and it depends on a few different things.
