The GTM Engineering & AI Agent Workflow
by Jeanne DeWitt Grosser • COO at Vercel (former Head of Americas Revenue & Growth at Stripe) at Vercel
Jeanne is currently the COO at Vercel, overseeing marketing, sales, customer success, and revenue ops. Previously, she spent nearly 9 years at Stripe, where she built their early sales team from the ground up and later served as Head of Americas Revenue and Growth. She is an expert in scaling GTM organizations for developer-focused and enterprise products.
🎙️ Episode Context
In this deep dive, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser deconstructs modern Go-To-Market strategies, arguing that GTM should be treated as a product rather than just a sales function. She details the emergence of the "GTM Engineer" role, how Vercel uses AI agents to replace rote SDR work, and provides a masterclass on advanced customer segmentation. The conversation also covers how to align sales with product teams and why enterprise buyers prioritize risk reduction over upside.
Problem It Solves
Scales sales operations efficiently without linearly increasing headcount, while removing repetitive rote work from humans.
Framework Overview
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.
🧠 Framework Structure
Shadow the Expert: Have a GTM Enginee...
Codify & Build Agent: Turn that workf...
Human-in-the-Loop QA: Initially, huma...
Shift Talent Upstream: Move humans aw...
When to Use
When you have a repeatable sales process (product-market fit) and need to scale lead qualification or outbound prospecting.
Common Mistakes
Trying to automate before you have a documented, working manual process; removing the human from the loop too early.
Real World Example
Vercel reduced their inbound SDR team from 10 people to 1 person by building a 'Lead Agent' that researches and drafts responses, with the human acting as a QA reviewer. The other 9 SDRs were redeployed to outbound sales.
We had 10 SDRs doing this inbound workflow and now we just have one that is effectively QA-ing the agent.
— Jeanne DeWitt Grosser