GTMnow

Huge thank you to the GTMnow & GTMfund team for having me! 🙌 I loved this session with Scott Barker. We covered a ton of ground and dove particularly deep on how Carta scaled from $20M to half a billion and continues to grow. Excited for what's to come 🚀 Thank you Sophie Buonassisi and Scott Barker for your partnership and the opportunity! Find the full episode linked below!🎙️ YouTube: https://lnkd.in/deYUrHbt Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dxSjbarp Apple: https://lnkd.in/dTiyKKyn GTMnow: https://lnkd.in/dCgDayCz

What does it take to scale revenue from $20M to $450M – and stay in the CRO seat for over 6 years while doing it?! Jeff Perry did just that. He came on The GTM Podcast and shared growth tips, and lessons on team design and performance management. My top takeaways: 1️⃣ Performance management is a cultural foundation, not a cleanup tool. Most orgs treat it reactively. Jeff used it to build a high-accountability, high-empathy culture, turning early underperformers into long-term stars. Nail it early to avoid downstream morale, legal, and team issues. 2️⃣ Segment your sales team before it's “necessary.” When he joined Carta, senior reps were handling SMB leads while junior reps took on enterprise. Segmenting by experience and deal complexity unlocked faster ramp, higher morale, and materially better win rates. 3️⃣ Great CROs don’t bring playbooks, they build them. Jeff didn’t copy-paste a DocuSign or Oracle template. He diagnosed what Carta actually needed—uncovering operational gaps, data issues, and support needs. B2B leaders: diagnose, then design. 4️⃣ The best reps act like quarterbacks, not heroes. Jeff teaches sellers to orchestrate the deal, not run it solo. Great reps know when to bring in execs, SEs, and cross-functional partners. Lone-wolf deals don’t scale. 5️⃣ Timing your SE team is a strategic unlock. Carta waited to build a solutions engineering org until complexity and enterprise motion demanded it. You don’t need SEs at $1M ARR—but at $50M+? They’re non-negotiable. 6️⃣ Multi-product GTM works best with specialized teams. Each Carta business line—cap table, fund admin, private equity—has dedicated sales, marketing, and product marketing. Different buyers require different motions. Copy this model if you’re going multi-product. 7️⃣ Your GTM is only as effective as your post-sale experience. Carta’s implementation became a growth engine—not just onboarding, but turning buyers into champions and triggering PE/VC flywheels. Retention is a strategy. Make onboarding a weapon. 8️⃣ Lead routing can break growth (and morale). A broken routing system put Carta’s top reps on low-value deals. Fixing it created immediate lift, proving that infra issues (not people problems) often explain underperformance. 9️⃣ Design your org around how customers buy, not internal math. Jeff built Carta’s GTM around customer journeys: segmenting sales, aligning CS, and structuring enablement by business line. Don’t optimize for internal convenience, optimize to win. You’ll also learn what running a sales org inside a $7.4B acquisition taught Jeff about startups. Spoiler: it made him fall in love with building from zero 💚 More growth tips from Jeff in the full episode, available on the GTMnow website or wherever you get your podcasts by searching "The GTM Podcast" 🎧 #gtm #salesleadership

From Oracle’s $7.4B Sun acquisition to scaling Carta's GTM engine - Jeff Perry has quietly built one of the most impressive revenue careers in tech. He scaled revenue at Carta from $20M to $450M. Before that, he was at Oracle when it acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4B, one of the company’s largest and most high-profile acquisitions. He was asked to lead the integration of Sun’s sales team into Oracle. This was like running a startup within Oracle, as he got to build and scale a new sales team from scratch. It sparked his passion for building from zero and ultimately inspired his move from big enterprise to startups (like Carta). What you'll learn in this episode: 🟢 Moving from enterprise sales leadership to a startup environment. 🟢 How to turn coworkers into mentors—and why it matters. 🟢 Why and when to build a solutions engineering team. 🟢 The myth of the “18-month CRO lifespan.” 🟢 Balancing empathy and accountability as a sales leader. 🟢 Why automation isn’t always the best path forward. Have a listen on The GTM Podcast - in the comments or wherever you listen.

Understanding your customer lifecycle is crucial for growth at any business stage. Kim Peretti highlights the importance of developing a maturity model that aligns with your company size, whether small, mid-market, or enterprise. The key takeaway? Engage regularly with customers from every segment to truly understand their journey and ensure your leadership experiences it firsthand. By doing so, you can tailor your people, processes, and technology to better serve them as you scale. Learn more from Kim Peretti in 🎧 GTM 123 on GTMnow.com and major podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube! #customerexperience #businessgrowth #customerlifecycle #leadershipdevelopment

Trying to win 7-figure deals, go upmarket, or build a sales team that drives both revenue and retention? Hayden E. Stafford breaks it down on The GTM Podcast this week. He spent 6 years as Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, reporting directly to Satya Nadella. Now, he is the President and CRO at Seismic, where he oversees the global go-to-market (GTM) organization, including pre-sales, sales, customer success, services, partners, and more. In this episode: 🟢 What Satya Nadella taught Hayden about culture, clarity, and transformation at Microsoft. 🟢 The exact playbook to move from SMB to enterprise—including partner enablement, segmentation, and incentive design. 🟢 Why retention isn't just a CS metric—and how to build a sales team that cares about it. 🟢 How to win in vertical SaaS, from breaking into financial services to owning the category. 🟢 What it takes to close a $600M+ deal in the middle of a financial crisis. You’ll also learn how Microsoft retooled its entire partner strategy to win enterprise, how Seismic drives NRR by aligning sales and CS, and what early-stage startups can borrow from billion-dollar playbooks - without the overhead. Have a listen on The GTM Podcast - in the comments or wherever you listen.

This episode has everything you need to know about AI agents 🤖 Ray Smith is the VP of AI Agents at Microsoft. He breaks down what exactly is an AI agent, the architecture of multi-agent workflows, which skills will matter most in an agent-first world (hint: think like a GM or growth hacker), and much more. I was too captivated to take notes the first time around, so gave it another listen on the flight back from GTMfund events this week. My top 10 takeaways from listening to Ray’s episode on The GTM Podcast: 1️⃣ Agents are the new APIs – design workflows, not just prompts. Stop thinking of LLMs as chatbots. The real unlock is giving agents a clear task, letting them reason through steps, and dynamically execute workflows across your stack. 2️⃣ You don’t need an AI team, you need domain expertise and velocity. The winners aren’t building agent infra from scratch. They’re nailing specific use cases, solving real business pain, and getting to ROI faster than IT can say “governance.” 3️⃣ Agents kill the SaaS seat license model. Agents don’t need seats or logins. If you’re building B2B software today, assume agents - not humans - will be your primary users. Design with APIs and deterministic behavior, not flashy UI. 4️⃣ Don’t build an agent, build an outcome. Start with a high-value use case. Don’t let your agent do everything. Be specific, scoped, and think like you're onboarding a new hire. Vague prompts = vague results. 5️⃣ Multi-agent orchestration is the new architecture. Cramming too much into one agent kills reliability. Instead, build modular, specialized agents that talk to each other—just like microservices. Easier to maintain, easier to scale. 6️⃣ AI infra is becoming the new cloud. The real moat isn’t your model or your tooling—it’s your customer insight and speed. Don’t waste time reinventing agent infra. Build on platforms and own the relationship. 7️⃣ Enterprises are buying agents now, not just experimenting. Ray’s seeing Fortune 500s roll agents into production within weeks. The entry point is narrow (claims, fraud, KYC), but the land-and-expand motion is fast—and budgets are real. 8️⃣ SaaS incumbents are vulnerable at the edges. You can now unbundle parts of massive apps with targeted agents that solve a single job better and cheaper. If your product’s value is just moving forms over data, you're exposed. 9️⃣ Delegation is the new productivity superpower. It’s not about doing the job, it’s about designing the system. The best operators will act like AI managers, orchestrating fleets of agents to scale themselves exponentially. 1️⃣0️⃣ Don’t chase hacks, build leverage. This isn’t about the next outbound trick. It’s about compound value. If your AI agent makes every SDR 5x more efficient or your CS team twice as proactive, that’s the new GTM edge. More on AI agents from Ray in the full episode, available on the GTMnow website or wherever you get your podcasts by searching "The GTM Podcast" 🎧 #gtm #aiagents

Mark G.'s favorite go-to-market strategy right now is, "BDRs all day, every day." Investing in internal BDR teams means taking control of your company's destiny. According to Mark, outsourcing BDR tasks or expecting AI to take over is a mistake. The real value lies in creating an internal culture dedicated to effective outbound motions and sequences. This allows you to steer your company's direction directly and proactively. "Any company I see that's struggling is because they never built the BDR muscle and outbound muscle within the company." Catch the full episode of 🎧 GTM 109 on GTMnow.com and major podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube!

Yesterday’s GTMfund event was packed with insights! Here are my biggest takeaways from each: Sydney Sloan on how AI is reshaping content strategy and GTM distribution: 1️⃣ Traditional SEO is less effective — content for the sake of content and keyword stuffing just doesn’t work. GTM teams must now focus on AI Optimization, not just traditional SEO. The new strategy is to create content around personas and jobs-to-be-done 2️⃣ PPC is getting crowded out, with ads pushed below the fold by AI-generated content. (I've seen this first-hand) 3️⃣ Channels like Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube are gaining traction — Reddit due to LLM indexing deals, LinkedIn favoring personal content, and YouTube rising again as a deep discovery engine. (I was personally surprised to hear about Reddit) 4️⃣ Companies have leveraged/paid B2B influencers to boost awareness and credibility. 5️⃣ Video is being pushed, but the experience is mixed; performance may be low in impressions but high in brand recall and reference. Ariela D Bitran Rich On why pricing is now a strategic lever, not a late-stage decision: 1️⃣ Many founders wait too long or overthink pricing, leading to either blind spots or analysis paralysis. Start simple, then evolve. 2️⃣ Don’t delay pricing conversations — pricing is part of the strategy that needs to happen alongside product development, not after. 3️⃣ Ariela shared an example where customers plateaued usage to avoid triggering pricing thresholds — a sign that pricing design was discouraging growth. 4️⃣ 2 out of ~35–40 people in the room were using pure seat-based pricing — a sign of how much the landscape has shifted. Her advice: build pricing around value metrics, cost drivers, and competitive dynamics. There was a awesome Open Sales Session run by Scott Barker 1️⃣ Many buyers are just experimenting with AI — not actively buying, just playing and learning. Its challenging since there's a ton of sign ups and quick conversions, but churn is high. 2️⃣ They’re unsure how to move from play to pilot to production — and vendors need to own that transition. (The best deals I've ever done, we're the ones where we took ownership on how the customer would move from POC to Production) 3️⃣ One strategy: pick a specific task the prospect does or used to do manually, and let AI take it over — like sending a quick update email on pipeline deals — then expand from there. It might not be game-changing, but it lets you get your foot in the door 4️⃣ Buyers are waiting for the next big thing — with the pace of innovation, they hesitate to commit. Rachit Kataria 👨🏽🌾 mentioned that showing your roadmap is now table stakes in sales conversations. (It made me want to create a similar slide) Big thanks to Sophie Buonassisi and GTMfund for the event. The GTM world is changing fast — and these conversations offered real clarity on how to evolve with it.

Great highlight reel w/ Scott Albro and Scott Barker on The Transaction Great overall take on the need for uniquely human skills that AI can't do but what about Scott's take on Gartner: "They are going to be more important than ever".

The book "The Jolt Effect" makes a point that people are comfortable being on a website or being an 'MQL', they're happy to fill out forms to read content or register for webinars... But when it comes to talking to someone, they often hesitate and go dark. The hardest part of selling is moving someone from that fear state to engaging with a human. Marketing can help transition people from that scary stage by providing content, enablement, trust-building, and customer stories to make customers feel confident in taking that step. — Kelly Hopping on The GTM Podcast. Catch the full episode of 🎧 GTM 96 on GTMnow.com and major podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube! #salesenablement #marketingstrategy #customerengagement #trustbuilding #b2bsales