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The Growth Wizards Podcast is the playbook for B2B GTM leaders who want smarter, repeatable ways to generate demand and build pipeline. Each episode breaks down how CEOs, CROs, and marketing execs drive growth — from top-of-funnel tactics and AI to thought leadership that converts.
Growth Wizards - Curtis Brinkerhoff
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Tanner Green: [00:00:00] All right, everyone. Thank you for joining another episode of Growth Wizards. We're excited to have Curtis Brinkerhoff here with us today. We found out actually that we are about, what, four or five miles from each other right
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah, super close.
Tanner Green: Yeah.
super close. So crazy. But Curtis I'll without further ado, I'll let you kinda give an intro of yourself, and then we can jump into the episode
Curtis Brinkerhoff: I appreciate it, Tanner. Thanks for inviting me on opportunity to spend time with you and to discuss the market and industry and where things are going. I'm the chief revenue officer at Impartner. I've been doing this for a few years now here at Impartner. Prior to that, I've been in different CRO roles at different companies, along with COO, EVP of sales and different sales roles.
Actually started over 20 years ago as a business development rep. All those business development reps out there that are looking for a career path hopefully this is one that they can look at, and if it's appealing to them, have some motivation. So
Tanner Green: Working your way up little by little and ended up on as a CRO. I love it. From one grind to another,
Curtis Brinkerhoff: [00:01:00] yeah. Yeah, absolutely. When you got a sales quota and you're used to it, you just keep going, right?
Tanner Green: Yeah. Doesn't stop. And it can't stop, won't stop for all the sales guys out there. I love it. Cool. Right on. I wanted to jump into the piece of news we had for today. So what I saw in an article a few weeks ago was a RevOps report for some trends that are reshaping revenue operations.
So now I saw a stat that said 78% of B2B companies now have a dedicated RevOps function. So for most of the listeners out there, you've all heard of RevOps before, but I thought personally, when I read this article, I thought that it was a given that people would implement it more often.
But now that it's at close to 80%, I was thrown off by how little people were doing it. Now that it's 80%, that's great, but why are people now implementing it [00:02:00] in their business, and what does that mean for companies today, Curtis?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: I guess I have a couple of thoughts. We're seeing such rapid change in the industry around, technology, what's being used to drive businesses, organizations, how to automate more things. And there's this natural bridge that needs to be built when you start to look at IT and the separation of IT from day-to-day operations and revenue operations because it's a quickly evolving space that you have to align your organization to what's happening today, not yesterday, because it's moving so quickly.
And revenue operations, the data behind it and the data constructs behind it are also being shifted by AI. I know everyone talks about AI and we hear it all over the place, and people are almost to the point where they're sick of it now but it has fundamentally changed the way that business operates.
And so when you look at it from a revenue operations perspective and how do you take systems, processes, data, [00:03:00] and methodologies and quickly apply them to your routes to market and your sales go-to-market and your marketing motion, the faster you can do that, the more agile and adept you're going to be in the industry to retain that leadership position or to gain a leadership position.
So RevOps, I believe, is not only critical today, but is going to continue to increase in its popularity and, how important it is for those roles of RevOps to be cross-functional and organize those bridges across the different teams that really impact your entire go-to-market,
Tanner Green: Yeah, I love it. So how much RevOps do you see in the automation and AI space now? Like it's even from three years ago, it's changed dramatically to where it is now, and lots of people are trying to figure out how do you implement AI in your business? How do you implement different automations? What are you doing today at Impartner?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah, question. So I see a couple of things. First [00:04:00] is everything you just said is important, but you have to be able to put security layers and constructs behind it. And so RevOps is really helping ensure continuity with security layer behind it, along with IT. For us we're implementing Gong MCP, Salesforce MCP, MCPs from pretty much every platform technology we have, right?
From bill.com to Rippling to Intacct, you name it. But we have extracted and pulled our sales team away from using a traditional CRM. Now, with one AI console, we can update every single piece of information simultaneously across those systems, all by using a Claude interface, right? And so we've eliminated Salesforce from a UI/UX perspective, and simply by having a call that's recorded in Gong, we know all the actions, all the attendees, all the follow-up, and all of that information is updated to Salesforce so that we know who [00:05:00] attended, new contacts, leadership changes, and then we adjust and adapt our forecast all in Gong and in Salesforce to align with our executives' dashboards.
That's all facilitated and organized because of RevOps playing that critical connectivity fabric between those systems, process, and people,
Tanner Green: Wow, I love that. So essentially everyone's got their own little Jarvis on implementing the CRM updates and from all the follow-ups and the details they need to input, because we all know that salespeople suck at that, to be honest.
Curtis Brinkerhoff: CRM gonna be interesting to see where CRM goes in the coming years. Right?
Tanner Green: That's true
Curtis Brinkerhoff: I've had more conversations with companies and these are not small companies. They're, enterprise-level companies that would honestly consider eliminating their entire CRM. And you look at companies like Palantir who have done that and leveraged full AI models that are growing exponentially because it's giving them more concise [00:06:00] data and more areas of follow-up.
And so it'll be interesting to see what happens over the coming years.
Tanner Green: Yeah, it is a wild west space. It always has been, and so that's never really changed but this is even more so is like, holy cow, what the heck is gonna happen out there?
But anyways I've seen, I've read a lot about, what you've been able to do, Curtis, and you've scaled companies from 3 million to over 100 million, which is incredible, right?
And you've been part of that whole journey. So what does that look like to scale from three to 100? How do you implement these processes and get this revenue, operations in check? And where do you start?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah, so there's so many aspects to that,
Tanner Green: I'm sure. Yeah.
Curtis Brinkerhoff: I think, the biggest thing for me to get to those successful points has been to come in and be very curious about how the company has been shaped and how it got to where it is, but then looking at what [00:07:00] needs to be reshaped and modified or even completely overhauled.
what I have found going into these organizations is that taking a step back to look at how we're shaping the vision of the company itself and the product itself, a lot of companies start off with a product vision or thought of what they're going to do and serve, and that gets modified along the way, but we don't commonly do that in iterative steps.
And so for me, getting sales to be more involved with product and product to be more involved with sales and then it, pulling marketing into that and having that dialogue be a continuous flow of here's what we're hearing from the industry, here's where it's headed, here's what we're predicting, and enabling products to build towards that allows us to stay further ahead of the market and really take customer feedback into what we're doing today but for the next generation of the technology.
And so aligning that vision to client strategy and then what is the story of [00:08:00] where they're trying to go has been absolutely critical so that you can see the market direction ahead of time. The other thing I would say is just a lot of people have gotten away from core ICP, who are we focused on, and how are we role-playing against that?
And I'm a firm believer still in the kind of the fundamental root cause of let's get a lean, agile, well-equipped sales team that knows what we do and we do it well, and then just role-play that of who we're going after, how we're going after them, what's going to resonate, but making sure that they're willing to learn and not always just coming with something to sell and pitch, but how are we listening to them and aligning to their business and strategy goal?
Because the, gone are the days of, "Hey, tell me what keeps you up at night." In fact, I hate that question. Whenever someone tells me or asks me that question, to me, it says they didn't do their research, right? They didn't do homework. They're not looking at industry trends and what's driving [00:09:00] models in business.
They really need to be prepared to bring those to the table and talk about how that's gonna apply to me and what we do. So
Tanner Green: I love that. And I also think that if you're talking to a salesperson and they're selling you on their product, and they come to you and they say, "Hey, this is what we..." They're not assuming, they're guessing, educated guess of, "This is where we think you're at in this situation based on what we know, and here's the research we've done, and this is what we think could help. Does that sound right?" Type of a deal, right? Instead of "Oh, so tell me your problem," right? 'Cause like you're saying, the tell me your problem these days is almost a lazy attempt at what they're going for. Not to say that you shouldn't focus on getting to the bottom of what their problem actually is but definitely focusing on, "Hey, I've already researched.
Here are a few things of what I think the problem could be. Does that sound right to you? And if that's true, then this is gonna be a good fit for you, or it's just not." And [00:10:00] so I think that's definitely what I like about what you're saying is you can't just rely on the sales team to just do all that research, but you have to align your product team and your marketing team all together to join as one cohesive motion to be able to make that a reality.
Is that kinda what you're saying?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah it absolutely is. And the ironic thing is that, everything that we just said about internal business and what we're doing at Impartner to try and align our company gets exponentially harder when you think about ecosystem models and scale, which is why Impartner is so focused on this partner ecosystem model of business.
And you look at B2B or B2B2C and who an end customer is, but you're trying to sell through a partnership model. Getting that alignment in your business itself is so hard, but with partners and partner go-to-market strategy is exponentially more difficult, right? Because I've got, [00:11:00] hundreds if not thousands of partners potentially as a business, and they all need to represent the same cohesive message, but they need that same skill, that same education, and that same training.
Not to mention the fact that, hey, we're gonna partner up with two or three companies to sell a complete security tech stack package, or I'm gonna sell, Dell computers along with some Intel chips that go behind them or whatever it may be, and I've got to work collaboratively across that entire deal structure in my go-to-market motion and align that to the end business need.
And so when we started this idea of full ecosystem automation, end-to-end ecosystem automation, that gets to be very complex and why businesses are struggling so much and why it's such a growing space right now,
Tanner Green: yeah. And honestly, creating an ecosystem and a marketplace in any industry or business is just so hard to do and requires so many moving parts. It requires so many different [00:12:00] knowledge, like expertise and knowledge in different areas, the receiver, the buyer, the consumer, the maker, the creator whatever it is. It's just, it's so much information that you have to know and be an expert in both sides and be able to bring them together in just this perfect match, like a matchmaking, business. But in any industry you're trying to think of, we all know how hard it is to find someone on Hinge, i'm married, but I think that you, the people can get the idea. It's a tough thing to do. But anyways I think the biggest part that I love about this is sort of the systems that you've created to be able to enable that. What does that look like on a day-to-day basis when you first came in, and how did you go about creating that and maintaining it?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah. It started off ironically our company started off as a marketing automation platform competing with your Marketos and Pardots of the world, and quickly evolved to say, "Hey, this is much more difficult than just marketing with [00:13:00] partners." There needs to be a way to conduct business with partners and partnerships and multifaceted market models.
Today, as you think about how people acquire technology, a lot of companies, now that AWS and Microsoft have launched their marketplaces, they're buying off of that, but they need to buy off of those marketplaces for a technology configuration that's been tailored for them. And there might be a partner involved, there might be multiple partners involved, and then there's a distributor involved.
And so here we've got this partner that we're asking to go out and sell, and we're asking that partner to sell effectively in this industry when they're trying to collaborate with six or seven or eight different parties potentially, right? And so when we came in and looked at this, we said we really need an end-to-end autonomous model that a partner can leverage to not only get educated, but to drive their pipeline forward, collaborate on deals, deal registration, deal management, CPQ, figuring out price quoting, price [00:14:00] configurations, and avoiding having to rely on salespeople at five or six or seven different companies to give them quotes just so that they can get a solution out the door.
So our focus was how do we look at an end-to-end autonomous model that will enable a partner user to get what they need, get it fast, and be responsive to the industry? And with that in mind, we just started to iterate, and we've continued to work on that and perfect that. And as models have changed and routes to market have changed, we've evolved at a pace that frankly, by having, some of the largest clients in the industry that are forward-thinking as opposed to more reactive in the market, we've been able to evolve with them, and so we're very thankful for those people that support us that way.
Tanner Green: Yeah, so you're almost beginning with the end in mind kind of mindset where you're talking about here's where we wanna go and here's what we know now, and let's just take one step at a time until we can iterate constantly to get there. Which I think is [00:15:00] a really smart way to go for any strategy because you can always ha- everyone-- like Mike Tyson says, "Everyone's got a plan until you get punched in the mouth."
So I think we can all relate to some of those times where it was like, "Whoa, that didn't work." Are there any times that you've had that when you were going through Impartner and growing it and iterating? Or are there any times where you're like, "Man, that was something that did not work, but it led to something else that did"?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah, absolutely. I actually as I've coached people and gotten on and done, it's been a while since I've done BDR calls, but there's been a few times where I'm like, "Hey, let's just cold call this person," and I jump on, take my stab at a cold call, and it doesn't work too well.
But from a company-wide perspective, several years ago we knew there was a need in the market to do some connectivity to downstrepartner and client CRM systems. And so we launched a product that was called Impartner Connect and had several people that actually bought it, bought into it, purchased it.
We stood it up, delivered it to market, the technology backbone that we were using was just problematic, and [00:16:00] so we ended up having to put five full-time people on this one product just to keep it running, and it was a big mess, right? It was a nightmare, frankly.
Tanner Green: Oh, man
Curtis Brinkerhoff: it was one of our biggest black eyes
Tanner Green: and the opportunity cost, you're like, "We've gotten so deep in this, we have to keep going," and
Yeah,
Curtis Brinkerhoff: yeah. We had commitments to customers and we were just losing money. But the backbone of that being as problematic as it was, it gave us a different vision of connectivity services and what they actually needed to be long term, right? And so we shifted our model, our way of thinking, and it guided us down a path of being able to rethink what connectivity services really needed to look like and include so that they could be essentially the foundation today of how we connect to some of your major distributors, downstream systems, and an integration architecture backbone that is considered to be, the most stable or one of the most stable, at least, in the industry.
And so we would've never got there if we hadn't had that failure, right?
Tanner Green: Yeah. It's [00:17:00] amazing how, some of these crazy discoveries in the world, not just in business but in the world, came from, something else that happened by happenstance. And I think the biggest one that everyone can think of, maybe not everyone, but at least in the medical world, is penicillin, how that came about by accident, and I don't know. If you don't know the story, I'm not gonna go over it, but essentially there was just a Petri dish that found, this bacteria, growing bacteria, and ended up being a cure for so many different diseases and sicknesses and especially at that time, it was like a revolutionary thing. And I'm not saying that it was by happenstance and accident that you guys created that system but it just leads to something so much greater and you just had no idea, and it's wow. I guess sometimes people get decision fatigue, analysis paralysis, or like they're scared to move on to the next thing because they're afraid, "What if it's not gonna work?
What if we couldn't do this?" But, so many times, especially in business when you start doing something, you just keep getting closer to the right solution [00:18:00] and
it works out, ends up working out, so
Curtis Brinkerhoff: I'm a huge fan of Albert Einstein. I don't know if you've studied him at all, but you look at these individuals that do some of these amazing things and they just stay committed. Elon Musk, he's put all of his money on the line time and time again, and now he's, arguably one of the most successful people in the world, right?
Tanner Green: Yeah. Yeah. It's just incredible to see the continuous grind and like you said, like your career going from business development to CRO, you just keep grinding, you keep going, and you figure it out. So that's what life's all about. But so Curtis I wanted to jump into the lightning questions.
I wanted to talk about what you are doing right now at Impartner and what your plan is in the GTM space for your team, for Impartner as if, as in the next six to 12 months.
Curtis Brinkerhoff: So we're doing some pretty exciting things really. We have created, because of the backbone of our technology and some of the capabilities I mentioned for integration, we've teamed up with some of your major distributors, leaders in the industry, [00:19:00] Microsoft, AWS, TD Synnex, Ingram Micro, and others, to create a multifaceted system that will enable partners to be guided and led by agentic models of data that come from all of these data sources.
So when you're trying to find the best route to market or the best path to acquire technology across the board here all of those things are gonna be feeding into our technology and platform so that a partner can actually, right from within one unified console, work collaboratively with all of these data points and systems.
So I can take a deal and an opportunity from its beginning state all the way to the point of quoting it and transacting it on an AWS marketplace through a distributor, all in one console, one unified motion, and never have to go anywhere else. So we, as we put that in place and we start to bring in these agents, those will be injected at the partner's desktop where they do [00:20:00] business, right?
So that's a, it's an important one for us. The second piece is just meeting people where they wanna do business and where they wanna buy, right? So all of these different models we're putting in place and the architecture behind our platform is going to enable these different go-to-market paths and motions.
As you look at how many things are starting to pop up of where people can buy, changing route to market and go-to-market strategy is significant. And so being able to meet them where they want to acquire your technology is gonna be vitally important. And so we're building that out right now with those companies, and I think it's gonna be a game changer,
Tanner Green: amazing. I love it. That's so cool, and I think that's what everyone's expecting in the future is just a one-stop shop of, "Hey, this is where I can go and chat with my AI to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z in my business." And then there's another one-stop shop in your own personal life to find other things.
That's what people are hoping for and [00:21:00] expecting and it's just such a great, such a better way of life, honestly. Like, when you don't have to go and do all these other things, it's-- And everything comes to you in this cohesive, well-formatted, easy-to-read system. That's just, that's abundance right there, and it's incredible.
And so you guys are creating abundance for your clients for future clients, for everybody in your team. I think it's awesome. I think it's great,
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah. The world's shifted for sure. I don't know how often you go to the store anymore, but I don't, 'cause the
Tanner Green: Only when I go to Costco with my wife to get some lunch. That's it.
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah, there you go.
Tanner Green: Yeah. But yeah, no, it's true. It's just like such a different world these days. But one more question for you, Curtis. What do you think is the best demand gen strategy to close businesses in your point of view, your opinion?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Oh, man, that's a good one. for me it's staying genuine, right? If people don't look at me as a target and don't try to sell me right out [00:22:00] of the gate, but they've done their homework, they're getting to know me, they've put personalized it a bit, but being genuine, right?
Just being genuine in who you are, who they are. I've met a lot of very wealthy people to poor people. I've been across the world and done a lot of different things, and guess what? Everybody has a life circumstance, has a family, has things going on, and everyone's trying to build their own success to, to be able to serve those things, right?
And I think if we think that in mind and you pull that into your demand gen and your demand gen strategy, I think that is frankly one of the most successful ones. I tell our business development team, "Hey if somebody spent time and went and looked at what I do and some of the, the things that I've posted and shared about my family, my background, and going over to Africa and Ethiopia and things like that gonna open up doors."
But not if you just say, "Hey, I noticed you went and did this in Africa and did some humanitarian service there. Oh, and by the way, I have this product that I think you're [00:23:00] gonna think is cool." Like that's not how those things work. We have to put in time, we have to put in energy and effort, invest in relationships.
And frankly, the more that AI drives the world, I think people yearn for real relationships. And if those relationships are just superficial and you're always a target, those will fade fast and you won't get anywhere. But if you can start to build genuine interest in people and what they're doing and what they're endeavoring to do, I think you got a real potential, and I think that's how you make a difference in your demand generation, frankly.
Tanner Green: I love it. I love the be genuine, be authentic, I think, and less AI, more connection. I love that. Yeah. Sweet. Curtis, how can people go find you and connect with you in a genuine way?
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Yeah. Would love to connect with people on LinkedIn. Just look me up, just Curtis Brinkerhoff on LinkedIn pretty easy to find. Impartner.com, if you go there, they can check out our company. Anyone on the team knows how to get to me. They can reach out to me anytime at [00:24:00] curtis.brinkerhoff@impartner.com.
Happy to, talk to people about some of these things, strategize, and build my knowledge even more because there's a lot of things I don't know, and so would be super thankful for the opportunity to get better at what I'm trying to do as well.
Tanner Green: Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Curtis, thanks so much for coming on the show, and thanks to the listeners for tuning in
Curtis Brinkerhoff: Appreciate it, Tanner. Thanks