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Video starts at 21:31
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Jeanne Grosser
"What we're just doing is shifting folks into something that uses more of their full capacity right out of the gates rather than the forcing function of working your way up the totem pole."
"No one graduated from college and was like, 'Yes, I just went to college for four years to become an SDR.' It was more, okay, that's where you are forced to start."
"The agent is as good as our humans were, but it's actually condensed the number of touches it takes to convert because it's so much quicker at responding."
"The person who built the lead agent was a single GTM engineer. He spent maybe 25-30% of his time on this. It was 6 weeks before we felt confident going from 10 to one."
"We had 10 SDRs doing this inbound workflow and now we just have one that is effectively QAing the agent. The other nine we deployed on outbound. So we got to move them up the value chain."
I've been getting so many asks for go to market help. With AI, it's just intensified because you have 10 players pursuing the same market opportunity and so your ability to actually bring the product to market to differentiate yourself from the competition has become more strategically important than it was previously. I had Jenna Ael on the podcast recently. One of her tips is you don't want to be focusing on here's the pain and problem we're solving and instead focus on here's how you will be better than your competitors. 80% of customers buy to
avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increase upside, which is a good thing for startup founders to understand. We all love to talk about the art of the possible, everything we're going to enable in the future, but that's often really a sale that's going to resonate with another founder. Everybody else, particularly enterprises, you're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter. I've heard a lot about how you think about go to market as a product. We buy a lot of things because of how we feel about them. The experience that you have of being sold to will increasingly actually differentiate a company and
drive buying decisions if products are only different at the merger. And so then you really want to create a customer buying journey that feels like very unique experiences. Something I've heard from so many people you've worked with is that your superpower is building a sales or that doesn't feel like a sales or to engineers. The litmus test I have always given my sales team is if you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product
manager. Today my guest is Gan Grosser. Gan was chief product officer at Stripe where she built their very early sales team from the ground up. She's currently COO at Versell where she oversees marketing, sales, customer success, revenue ops, and field engineering. Gene has built world-class go to market teams at multiple unicorns and has advised dozens of companies on doing the same. In our conversation, we go deep on what a
world-class go to market team looks like, including what the heck is go to market, the rise of the goto market engineer and how this role is already enabling her team to operate 10 times faster, a bunch of very specific tactics to level up your go to market skills, a primer on segmentation, how to think about your goto market process like a product, her favorite go to market tools, her hot takes on PLG and sales comp and sales hiring, and so much more. If you are looking to get smart on the latest and greatest in go to market thinking, this episode is for you. A
huge thank you to Claire Hughes Johnson, Kate Jensen, and James Deiet for suggesting topics for this conversation and Kelly Schaefer for the connection. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get an entire year free of a ton of incredible products including Devon, Lovable, Repid, Bolt, NAD, Linear, Superhum, Dcript, Whisper Flow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic
Patterns, Raycast, Shapeyard D, Mob, and Hand, Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennisnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Jean Grosser after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Data Dog, now home to EPO, the leading experimentation and feature flagging platform. Product managers at the world's best companies use Data Dog, the same platform their engineers rely on every day to connect product insights to product issues like bugs, UX friction, and business impact. It starts
with product analytics, where PMs can watch replays, review funnels, dive into retention, and explore their growth metrics. Where other tools stop, Data Dog goes even further. It helps you actually diagnose the impact of funnel drop offs and bugs and UX friction. Once you know where to focus, experiments prove what works. I saw this firsthand when I was at Airbnb, where our experimentation platform was critical for analyzing what worked and where things went wrong. And the same team that built experimentation at Airbnb built EPO. Beta do then lets you go beyond the numbers with session replay.
