Hayden Stafford is the President and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Seismic, where he oversees the global go-to-market (GTM) organization, including pre-sales, sales, customer success, services, partners, and more. Prior to joining Seismic, he served as President of Global Field Operations at Pegasystems. Before that, Hayden was Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, leading Global Business Applications (Microsoft Dynamics 365) for six years. Earlier in his career, he was an SVP at Salesforce and spent nearly a decade at IBM, ultimately serving as VP and Managing Director on Wall Street.

Discussed 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.

Highlights: 

05:19 — How Satya Nadella sold his internal vision and rebuilt Microsoft’s culture from the ground up
 13:13 — The partnership blueprint: how to scale with partners, not just transact with them
 28:18 — Going deep in verticals: why Seismic dominated financial services while others avoided it
 34:44 — How Hayden closed a $600M+ deal with Merrill Lynch after the 2008 crash
42:40 — Why retention should be part of your sales comp—and how to make it work
49:15 — The “Value Continuum”: a framework for aligning sales, services, and CS around business outcomes

Guest Speaker Links (Hayden Stafford):

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haydenestafford/
• Seismic: https://seismic.com/

Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
• Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):

• Website
• LinkedIn
• Twitter / X
• YouTube
• The GTM Podcast (on all major directories)

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.