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Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

Episode #139

COO at Vercel (former Head of Americas Revenue & Growth at Stripe)

Vercel

⚡Execution🎯Product Strategy📈Growth & Metrics

📝Full Transcript

15,120 words
Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:00): I've been getting so many asks for go-to-market help. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (00:00:03): 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. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:18): I had Jenna Abel 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. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (00:00:27): 80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increased 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. For everybody else, particularly enterprises. You're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:52): I've heard a lot about how you think about go-to-market as a product. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (00:00:55): 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 merchant. And so then you really want to create a customer buying journey that feels like very unique experiences. Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:17): Something I've heard from so many people you've worked with is that your superpower is building a sales org that doesn't feel like a sales org to engineers. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (00:01:23): 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 ...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1Treat Go-To-Market as a product: Map the user journey and deliver value at every touchpoint, even for non-buyers.
  • 2The rise of the GTM Engineer: Use technical talent to build internal tools and AI agents that automate workflows.
  • 3AI in Sales: Replace rote SDR tasks with AI agents (human-in-the-loop) to allow humans to focus on high-value interactions.
  • 480% of enterprise buying decisions are made to reduce risk or avoid pain, not to capture upside.
  • 5Advanced Segmentation: Move beyond 'Small/Medium/Large' to include axes like 'Growth Potential', 'Business Model', and technical metrics.
  • 6Sales is R&D: A great sales team should act as an extension of Product Management, gathering high-fidelity signal from the market.
  • 7Pricing is a product feature: Align pricing models (e.g., consumption-based) strictly with where the customer derives value.

📚Methodologies (3)

⚡ Execution

Instead of hiring masses of SDRs for prospecting, hire GTM Engineers to build internal AI agents. These agents automate research and communication workflows, enabling a significantly smaller team to handle higher volumes with greater precision.

Core Principles

  • 1.Shadow the Expert: Have a GTM Engineer shadow the highest-performing human to understand their manual workflow (tabs open, data sources, logic).
  • 2.Codify & Build Agent: Turn that workflow into code/agents using tools (like Vercel's AI SDK) to perform research and draft messages.
  • 3.Human-in-the-Loop QA: Initially, humans must review/approve every Agent action to train the system and ensure quality.
  • +1 more...

"We had 10 SDRs doing this inbound workflow and now we just have one that is effectively QA-ing the agent."

#engineering#agent#workflow
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GTM as a Product Framework

by Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

🎯 Product Strategy

Treat the buying experience itself as a product feature. Design the customer journey to deliver value at every interaction (even if they don't buy) and create unique, consultative experiences rather than transactional interrogations.

Core Principles

  • 1.Value at Every Touchpoint: Provide insights (e.g., benchmarks, architecture advice) in the first meeting, regardless of the sale outcome.
  • 2.Consultative Discovery: Replace '20 questions' with collaborative exercises (e.g., whiteboarding architecture) that help the customer clarify their own thinking.
  • 3.Experience Differentiation: If products are similar, the experience of being sold to becomes the deciding factor.
  • +1 more...

"The experience that you have of being sold to will increasingly actually differentiate a company... you really want to create a customer buying journey that feels like very unique experiences."

#product#strategy
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📈 Growth & Metrics

Moving beyond simple 'Small/Medium/Large' segmentation by introducing axes that correlate with revenue potential and complexity. This often involves an X/Y axis of Size vs. Growth Potential, layered with business model or technical attributes.

Core Principles

  • 1.The Growth Axis: Segment not just by current size, but by growth rate (e.g., 200% YoY vs 8% YoY), as this dictates future value (LTV).
  • 2.Business Model nuance: Distinguish customers by their model (e.g., B2B vs. Marketplace) to tailor the product pitch (e.g., Invoicing vs. Connect).
  • 3.Technical Signals: Use external data (like web traffic/Crux score) or internal usage patterns to predict complexity and willingness to pay.
  • +1 more...

"If you look at segmentation as a graph... X-Axis was size, Y-Axis was growth potential... We wanted to spend more time going after the 200% growers."

#multi-dimensional#segmentation#matrix
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