Anne Pao on How to Build a High-Growth GTM Engine
Anne Pao on How to Build a High-Growth GTM Engine
The Nue Team
Description
In this episode of The Lift, we sit down with Anne Pao, founder of Ignite Consulting and long-time RevOps leader, to explore what it takes to build go-to-market systems that work.
Anne has scaled companies from $25M to $5B, led revenue operations at some of the fastest-growing tech companies, and now partners with startups and scale-ups as a career fractional CRO.
The conversation explores why alignment between marketing and sales so often breaks down, how “Stage Zero” can transform lead management, and why the best RevOps leaders think like translators—bridging silos, clarifying language, and designing processes that actually stick.
Anne also shares candid lessons from her work with clients like Thinkific, her role in Pavilion’s Women’s Summit, and her perspective on how RevOps is evolving in the age of AI.
Transcription
Mark Evans: Welcome to the Lift. I'm Mark Evans, joined by my cohost, James MacArthur, and today we're joined by Ann Pao, founder of Ignite Consulting and a seasonal fractional CRO and Rev ops leader with over 20 years shaping go-to-market strategy, operations, and analytics for some of the fastest growing tech and healthcare companies, Anne has helped scale businesses from $25 million to over 5 billion in revenue.
She's led companies like Tubular Labs, Airship Heap, and Maven Clinic. And she now partners with startups and scale-ups to build GTM foundations that drive sustainable growth. Welcome to the podcast, Ann.
Anne Pao: Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. James, I saw you going. Bow, bow. Yes. That is how you say my last name.
And Mark was kind enough to ask. I saw that clicking for you.
James McArthur: It finally clicked. It's been years that I've been saying it wrong. Thank you, Mark, for asking the question. I appreciate it.
Anne Pao: Don't [00:01:00] worry. I have people who've known me for 20 years don't even know my last name is ba so it's all good.
James McArthur: As someone who has an exceptionally easy last name, I've never dealt with that and that's on me for not asking the questions, so I'm happily enlightened, so thank you. So Anne, I'm. I'm ecstatic that you're here with us today. Aw. I cannot be more excited because you and I have known each other for a long time.
You just crush it with your own community. You crush it on doing webinars, all of that stuff, but you're constantly building, constantly finding new things to work on to talk about. Tell me a little bit about something that you've done recently that you're really excited for.
Anne Pao: Something I'm immensely proud of, and honestly, a lot of credit goes to them as individuals and also my partner, my husband. On the flip side, why we're here, we're talking about work. I do work obviously in the robot space. We're going to get into that in the revenue go to market space.
But the other thing that I think I'm most proud of, even though it [00:02:00] hasn't happened yet, but it's just been taking up a lot of my time, is you mentioned advocacy. I co-lead the Women of Pavilion Group. It's an 1100 person group. And we are hosting our second women's summit in literally like how many days now?