A RevOps leader asked her co-founder for a $20,000 consultant budget. He handed her a $200 Cursor license instead — and accidentally turned her into one of the sharpest AI builders in go-to-market.

Sarah Madden — known across RevOps as Smadds — started as employee #64 at Braze, cold-calling accounts as a BDR until a single waterfall chart in an all-hands convinced her the data behind revenue was where she belonged. Today she is Head of Revenue Operations & Strategy at FERMÀT, and she runs almost her entire job out of the terminal.

In this conversation with LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico, Smadds opens up her greatest hits: the exact skills, agents, and workflows her team uses every single day. The three buckets every skill falls into, the rule of three that tells you when to build one, the Pipeline Ops plugin that surfaces evidence instead of autofilling your CRM, and the infrastructure discipline underneath it all. If you have ever wondered what RevOps actually looks like once AI does the grunt work — this one is the playbook.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARNWhy a single waterfall chart in an all-hands can turn a BDR into a lifelong ops obsessiveHow a $200 Cursor license replaced a $20K consultant budget — and rewired what "non-technical" meansThe three buckets every RevOps skill falls into: surfacing context, process, and infrastructureThe rules of three: the exact test for when a workflow should become a skillWhy the Pipeline Ops plugin surfaces the evidence for every field instead of autofilling itHow the import-lead-list skill collapses a full day of CSV cleanup into 40 minutesWhy "no MCP, no CLI" is now a dealbreaker for adopting any GTM toolThe infrastructure skills that keep a terminal-run job healthy: wrap, pick up, and a core-tools trackerHow the RevOps org is bifurcating — and why heads of RevOps keep becoming COOs

CHAPTERS00:00 — Cold open + intro03:06 — The waterfall chart that hooked her on ops07:18 — Why every ops person builds their own spreadsheets08:29 — The $200 Cursor license that replaced a $20K consultant13:34 — Reevaluating "non-technical" + the infinite RevOps backlog16:09 — The three buckets: surfacing context, process, infrastructure18:30 — The rules of three: when a workflow becomes a skill24:00 — Slack as a data lake + Anthony's customer-health agent27:43 — The data-enrichment eval that became a tool-eval skill36:02 — The Pipeline Ops plugin: evidence, not autofill42:00 — The import-lead-list skill: a full day down to 40 minutes47:08 — The FERMÀT tech stack + "no MCP, no relationship"49:58 — Conversational intelligence hot take: do you need video?53:10 — Building a RevOps team when the roles are changing56:57 — Heads of RevOps becoming COOs + GTM is the messiest data59:26 — Demos: CMUX, the context bar, wrap + pick up01:07:13 — The Skill Factory + core-tools tracker01:10:34 — Spend tracking, the RevOps OS, and managing blast radius

ABOUT THE GUESTSarah Madden — known across RevOps as Smadds — is Head of Revenue Operations & Strategy at FERMÀT, the AI-native commerce platform. She started as employee #64 at Braze, cold-calling accounts as a BDR until a single waterfall chart in an all-hands convinced her that the data behind revenue was where she belonged. From there she built pricing and media-planning teams at BuzzFeed, survived a fire-sale startup exit, and became the first RevOps hire at FERMÀT. Today she runs almost her entire job from the terminal, and her team ships skills and agents that collapse multi-hour RevOps workflows into minutes.

ABOUT THE LEANSCALE PODCASTThe LeanScale Podcast is the show for GTM operators building the next generation of revenue infrastructure. Hosted by Anthony Enrico, co-founder of LeanScale.

▶ Learn more: https://www.leanscale.team▶ Follow Anthony on LinkedIn▶ Follow Sarah (Smadds) on LinkedIn

#RevOps #GTM #AI #GTMEngineering #PipelineOps #ClaudeCode #MCP #Salesforce #B2BSaaS #LeanScale

How She Runs All of RevOps From the Terminal | Sarah Madden (Smadds) on Building AI Skills at FERMÀT

The LeanScale Podcast with Anthony Enrico

How She Runs All of RevOps From the Terminal | Sarah Madden (Smadds) on Building AI Skills at FERMÀT