Max Altschuler and Scott Barker back at it for yet another monthly jam session!

Touching base on the latest internal and external updates, our official GTM retreat announcement, newest deals, the secret sauce in throwing executive level events, & Max's hot tips on his 36th birthday and everything he's been working on in regards to personal and career development.

Highlights:
(1:33) Annual GTM retreat details.

(2:10) GTM Job Board updates.

(3:33) How to host a white-glove experience event for executives?

(5:40) Building and fostering a deeply authentic community (through our annual retreat).

(7:20) The value and takeaways from our GTM sessions - how we look at businesses, how we size up opportunities, etc.

(16:48) Max's 36th Birthday fueled with reflection, recalibration, self growth.

Guest Speaker Link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Tyler Short joins us this week as we dive into all things Go-To-Market, but this time with a Venture spin on things. We get a deeper glimpse into what's going on across the VC world and the implications of today's market for founders & investors. Tyler currently works as the General Counsel and Director of Operations at SixThirty Ventures.

Tyler peels the onion on one of his biggest career learnings to date - a venture deal that crumbled apart. Not one to miss!

What You Will Learn:

• Things to look out for as someone investing in startups today.
• How to fundraise smarter.
• The fundamentals to help you better navigate which startups to invest in.
• Legal necessities to be aware of as a founder.
• Knowing when to walk away from a deal.

Highlights:
(3:26) VC terminology & how to break into venture.

(6:28) Predictions and themes in today's Market.

(14:15) A deal that fell apart and what Tyler learned throughout the process.

(30:36) Best advice to founders struggling to raise in this market.

(33:27) Advice to founders around legal work.

(35:42) Tyler’s view on AI legal tech.

(38:15) What the best founders do to move the needle.

Guest Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-short-gc/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TylerShortVC

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Erica Kuhl joins us this week for an inspiring episode on how to build your community in today's environment, with over 20 years of enterprise community expertise.

Erica shares some valuable tips and tricks that she learned after spending over a decade successfully building the Trailblazer community and ecosystem at Salesforce.

What You Will Learn:

• How she built the Trailblazer Salesforce community from scratch and what inspired her to do it.
• How to run programs with any size budget and any size team.
• How to build community strategies to scale.
• The positive outcomes of exceptional leadership.
• The importance of aligning community to a business strategy.

Highlights:
(2:30) Intro & Erica's experience building out trailblazers at Salesforce.

(10:55) Hot take: The over saturation of community.

(18:25) Challenges scaling the community at Salesforce.

(35:24) What Erica would do differently if she could go back and build Salesforce's Community all over again?

(42:58) Erica's advice on how to make team meetings more upbeat, lively, and productive.

(45:20) Erica's take on a widely held belief that revenue leaders share that she thinks might be bullsh*t.

(47:23) Step 1 when starting a community.

Guest Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericakuhl/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericakuhl
Blog: https://medium.com/@erica.kuhl
Website: https://www.ericakuhl.com

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Dave Kennett joins us on this week's episode to discuss lessons learned throughout his years transforming businesses to adapt for a digital world, the art form of sales, how to lead from the front, and walks us through the genesis and evolution of Replayz.

In 2019, after an extensive career at notable companies such as AutoTrader.ca, Strutta, Payfirma, Hootesuite, and MergeBase, Dave founded Replayz - a predictive SaaS platform that uses Data Science to analyze Call Scoring Results to predict what skills matter the most.

What You Will Learn:

• The importance of role-playing, how to communicate to the CFO.
• Steps to building trust and rapport through credibility.
• How to cultivate and leverage customer stories for a competitive advantage.
• 5 leadership tools to arm your team with.
• Ways to visibility improve your win rate.
• How to lead from the front, and learn the most from past mistakes.
• Strategies to navigate career path options in the current environment .

Highlights:
(5:20) Call coaching culture & Replayz pain point solution strategy.

(7:45) Blind spots in discovery/demos & how to avoid them.

(13:22) Common threads of sales reps that consistently crush it.

(18:10) How to introduce a customer story?

(21:45) The importance of role-playing.

(25:00) Digitally transforming AutoTrader to Trader.ca.

(27:10) Leadership lessons from experience.

(34:25) How to think about career pathing.

(39:10) Rounding out your leadership skills.

(40:25) Widely held beliefs that are wrong.

(44:30) Actionable moves available now.

Guest Speaker Link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkennett/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

‘Thinking more out of the box instead of just following playbooks is something that I think is important.’ - Martin Gontovnikas.

In this week’s episode, Scott Barker chats with Martin Gontovnikas ‘Gonto’ about taking big risks in marketing, Generative AI, and understanding customer behavior while making marketing strategies.

Gonto is the founder of Hyper Growth Partners. He previously worked with Off Zero where he started in branding relations and ended up in marketing and growth, growing with the company in revenue from 20 dollars to 20 million average revenue.

What You Will Learn:

• The impact of Generative AI on marketing.
• How to achieve big hairy audacious goals in marketing.
•  Experimenting in marketing when risk tolerance is low.

Highlights:
(04:02) Generative AI for marketing.

(09:56) Where will Generative AI be in 10 years?

(13:31) Audacious goal experiments that worked.

(22:53) Big audacious goals that turned out successful.

(30:29) Restructuring back after implementing an audacious idea.

(33:40) Running experiments when risk tolerance is low.

(36:40) How long do you run an experiment before making a decision?

(39:31) What most revenue leaders believe but Gonto doesn’t agree with.

(44:01) Fitting marketing strategies into users’ habits.

(46:36) How to get in touch with Gonto?

Guest Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgonto/en
Website: https://www.hypergrowthpartners.com/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Episode Summary

There are many benefits of the marketing and sales teams working together. It helps generate better leads, improve conversion rates, and eventually, increase company revenue. But how do you align marketing and sales strategy? 

In this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, our host Sam Jacobs welcomes Mariana Cogan, the CMO of People.ai. They talk about why buying needs to be a team sport, why forecasting won't lead to the growth you need, and the importance of diversity in technology.

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: Mariana Cogan

💡 What she does: She's the CMO of People.ai.

💡 Company: People.ai

💡 Noteworthy: Mariana is known for building strong alignment with sales. She's also a committed advocate of diversity inclusion and founded the Hispanic ERG resulting in building the best teams and bringing different lenses to the C-suite.

💡 Where to find Mariana: LinkedIn

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Max Altschuler and Scott Barker back at it for another monthly jam session. Sharing some compelling internal company updates as well as the impact of our candidate placements in the last year (placing over 80 candidates in the last year). We also can't help but discuss some topical stuff, including: Whether companies should begin to ban alcohol at work related events, generational trends, and ChatGPT's takeover on our creativity.

Highlights:
(1:50) The generational evolution within the work force.

(4:45) The importance of our creativity and whether ChatGPT has much competition against it.

(13:17) Hot take on whether companies should ban alcohol or not.

(16:20) Internal company updates & the motivation behind our decisions [new HQ office, new official GTMfund hires].

(27:00)  Deal updates & SPVs.

(29:42) Angel Investing sessions and candidate placements at our portfolio companies.

Guest Speaker Link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Mark Stephenson joins us in this week’s episode to talk about the modern revenue architecture. Mark has 30 years of solution sales leadership experience, with high growth series A through D companies. Currently he's an advisor at Evisort, former VP of Sales at Avi Networks, and has worked at large companies such as HP, Cisco, & Xerox.. 

We kick off this episode by unpacking the 5 leading and 4 lagging indicators of a strong go-to-market team that drive your business.

What You Will Learn:

• The importance of getting cross functional alignment within your team.
• Leading metrics that every leader should be focused on.
• 5 layer framework on modern revenue.

Highlights:
(8:03) 5 Layers on how to Go-to-market.

(13:48) Problems to solve on the Go-to-market approach.

(20:37) Where Mark’s gone right and wrong in defining ICP.

(26:10) How to hire great talent.

(32:18) Cross-functional alignment.

(36:00) the leading and lagging metrics for successful alignment.

(45:00) Mark’s take on the layoffs happening in todays market.

Guest Speaker Link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-s-2b28054/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

In this week’s episode, Scott is joined by Bryan Breckenridge and Corey Marshall, the co-founders of VITAL, a company that harnesses impact-powered revenue and culture to accelerate growth.

Corey Marshall is a builder, advisor, and investor with a strong background in CRM Data. He previously worked with Splunk, a cybersecurity startup where he built programs around workforce development, employee engagement and volunteerism.

Bryan Breckenridge is a social intrapreneur who thrives at the intersection of corporate and nonprofit mission fulfillment maximizing social, environmental and economic returns. He has implemented growth and impact strategies and integrated nonprofit networks into core operating structures at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, Zillow, and Snyk.

They explore the world of social impact issues in startups, including how and when startups should get involved in social issues, which issues to take on, how to align these with the company’s values and how these help in connecting with the customers for eventual profitability.

Highlights:
(1:44) Introduction of speakers.

(2:50) Corey Marshall’s background story.

(5:15) The impetus for Splunk.

(6:36) Bryan’s background.

(9:42) Bryan’s time at Salesforce.

(11:08) The truth about the Sales profession.

(13:26) Having environmental, social and governance in mind as a Startup.

(19:34) Attracting talent that aligns with your company’s values.

(22:09) When should a company take a stance on social issues?

(29:11) How should startups establish which social impact issues to focus on?

(36:42) Corey’s story about building strong partnerships through participating in social impact issues.

(40:16) Merging problem solving for clients with addressing social issues they are passionate about.

(47:39) Strategies that revenue leaders or founders can implement.

(53:56) Social impact participation extends beyond sales and marketing.

(56:14) How to get in touch with Bryan and Corey.

Guest Speaker Links:
Bryan's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanbreckenridge/
Corey's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreymarshall/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.

Pivoting and verticalization has the potential to be a  game-changer for many companies. A case in point is the story of Seismic.

On the podcast today is Ed Calnan,  the founder and former CRO of Seismic, a company he led through the pandemic. In this episode, you will learn how Ed, as the  company’s first BDR, grew the company to 1,500 people, 2,000 customers, and $300 million in ARR  through successful pivoting and verticalization to financial services.

What You Will Learn:

• The power of pivoting and verticalization and how to do it successfully.
• The value of vacation, rest, and relaxation.
• The importance of analyzing and sharing team successes.

Highlights:
(3:00) Ed’s reflection on founding Seismic and taking a long break after 11 years.

(9:30) The value of sales enablement.

(13:00)  How to pivot and verticalize successfully: Case study of Seismic.

(32:20) The benefits of being a specialist and an expert.

(35:50) Why you need to analyze and share team successes.

(48:42) Discussion on consistent communication, being open and authentic.

(49:42) Strategies for growing a company and harnessing customer stories.

(52:20) A strategy founders and revenue leaders should implement to move the needle.

(55:30) One common misbelief held by revenue leaders.

(57:03) The challenges of being a revenue leader: How to identify and address core issues.

Guest Speaker Link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edcalnan/

Host Speaker Links:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

The GTM Podcast
The GTM 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.