LeanData Announces the 2026 OpsStars Awards Winners

Recognizes excellence among GTM operations professionals navigating today’s AI transformation

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LeanData, the backbone for AI-ready go-to-market infrastructure, announced the winners of the annual OpsStars Awards, recognizing professionals and organizations redefining where intelligence meets growth in GTM operations.

Now in its 11th year, OpsStars is the premier gathering for GTM leaders driving the real work of revenue. The 2026 OpsStars event was held October 5 and 6 at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco.

“As organizations transition to an AI-powered world, ops professionals are the ones on the hook, making sure their organizations can run AI at full speed — and trust the output,” said Katy Keim, CEO of LeanData. “Looking at the winners of this year’s OpsStars awards, I feel tremendous optimism for the future of GTM. We’re in good hands.”

Winners of the 2026 OpsStars Awards

OpsStar of the Year
Nicole Peinado, Revenue Technology Manager, AI Ops, Uber for Business

“Despite being a major growth engine, Uber for Business’s self-service channel was leaking revenue at the finish line: Roughly 93% of sign-ups dropped out before becoming active, revenue-generating customers, and our human “Proactive Onboarding” team could manually reach only about 20–25% of that funnel,” said Peinado. “We built an Agentforce SDR agent and wired it directly into LeanData so AI engagement and deterministic revenue orchestration operate as one connected motion instead of separate tools. We’ve now doubled our outreach volume and seen a 43% improvement in conversion rate across the self-service AI motion.”

Agentic GTM Award
Korn Ferry

“Korn Ferry partnered with LeanData to fully automate lead routing in tandem with 6sense’s AI email capability, and we used LeanData to bring structure to our detailed, business-specific routing requests,” said Jessi White, VP, Marketing Operations at Korn Ferry. “We have demonstrated tangible ROI from using AI as the first layer of engagement: more leads converting, greater value from each deal and faster progression into the sales process.”

AI-Powered Program of the Year
Coalesce

“Business challenges we thought were sales productivity issues — speed to lead, lead routing accuracy, and inconsistent follow-up on inbound demand — turned out to be a much deeper systems and operational design problem,” said Anthony Valles, director of GTM Operations at Coalesce. “Spending time with our BDR team to dig into how they actually operated led to the creation of CoalesceIQ, our internal GTM hub. The impact was immediate: SLA adherence jumped from only 28% to 93% of inbound leads being dispositioned, plus time given back to the reps to prioritize high-intent accounts.”

Buying Groups Trailblazer Award
SUSE

“We re-architected our go-to-market workflow by designing and operationalizing a signal-based buying group architecture, powered by LeanData Buying Groups Edition (BGE) and Journeys,” said Zach Ziino, revenue systems architect at SUSE. “Now, our reps get immediate, aggregated visibility into active buying committees, enabling coordinated plays while buyer momentum is highest. And our ISRs and AEs now operate off the exact same Journey report views, establishing a single source of truth for multi-threading target accounts.”

GTM Velocity Award
Vestwell Holdings Inc.

“We needed our prospects, including self-serve leads, to move from initial interest to a booked meeting as fast as possible,” said YounJu Jeny Bae, senior manager of Revenue Operations at Vestwell Holdings. “By pairing real-time LeanData lead routing with BookIt for Forms and BookIt Links, as soon as a lead comes in it’s matched to the right rep by territory — automatically, with no manual step between form submission and a booked call.”

Intelligent GTM Orchestration Award
PagerDuty

"As PagerDuty has grown, we've made it a priority to give our go-to-market engine the same visibility and rigor we help our customers bring to their digital operations," said Gina Morris, senior manager of Marketing Operations & Analytics at PagerDuty. "With LeanData, we built an observability and governance layer on the tools we already had. The results came quickly: daily logging rose from under one record a day to more than 40 and we cut a key source of pipeline loss by nearly 28%."

Revenue Lifecycle Award
Verizon Connect

“Our lack of a true onboarding journey was negatively impacting customer experience,” said Jacob Buchnat, systems architecture engineer. “To standardize the onboarding journey, our company leveraged several tools in our tech stack, including LeanData to automate assignment of single-point-of-contact VOSS agents to customer accounts with onboarding projects. Our new onboarding method has consistently outperformed the legacy process, with results including 33% reduction in customer churn, 44% reduction in shipping errors and a reduction of seven days in median full installation time.”

GTM Systems Transformation of the Year
Autodesk

OpsStars Awards Finalists
In addition to the winners, each category included a number of worthy finalists:

• Agentic GTM Award: Tealium, Yext
• AI-Powered Program of the Year: Traliant, Wisetech Global/e2openAI
• Buying Groups Trailblazer Award: Hitachi Vantara, SS&C Blue Prism
• GTM Systems Transformation of the Year: Carta, Pandadoc
• GTM Velocity Award: Vestwell Holdings Inc.
• Intelligent GTM Orchestration Award: BILL, Birdeye
• Revenue Lifecycle Award: BambooHR, Extrahop
• OpsStar of the Year: Wendy Lampert, BILL; Heather Dillon, Lyra Health; Jeremiah Washington, DEEL; Brent Perumal, Infoblox; Ari Capogeannis, NVIDIA

About OpsStars

The GTM motion is evolving, being completely redefined at a breakneck pace. It’s becoming a dynamic, AI-driven revenue engine where every insight powers faster, smarter execution. OpsStars is a community for GTM professionals — the RevOps leaders, GTM strategists, and operators who don’t just follow best practices in this rapidly changing world, they define them. It’s a place for peer-to-peer learning, mentorship and career growth, giving operations leaders the tools to adapt and thrive in complex go-to-market environments.

The annual OpsStars event brings together hundreds of practitioners and executives for sessions, workshops and networking focused on the most pressing challenges in operations today. Now in its eleventh year, the event is a cornerstone for sharing real-world strategies and advancing the role of operations in B2B organizations.

About the OpsStars Awards

The OpsStars Awards celebrate individuals and teams whose groundbreaking innovations have propelled their organizations forward. This year’s categories reflect the way elite GTM teams actually operate in an AI-powered world — from intelligent orchestration and buying group strategy to velocity, transformation and full-lifecycle alignment. These awards highlight the strategic role operations professionals play in driving revenue and the impact of their leadership within their organizations.

About LeanData

LeanData provides the backbone for AI-ready go-to-market infrastructure. More than 1,000 leading B2B companies and a community of 5,000-plus OpsStars rely on LeanData to fuel efficient growth by aligning marketing, sales and customer service execution with the entire AI-enabled customer journey. LeanData’s Intelligent GTM Orchestration platform acts as the connective tissue across the revenue lifecycle, integrating and normalizing buyer data, automating signal-driven workflows and delivering AI-powered insights. LeanData is a 2027 Salesforce Partner of the Year Award for Customer Value and a #1 G2 Crowd Provider.