GTM Science - A show for GTM and RevOps leaders

Union Square Consulting

To us, GTM is both an art and a science. We don't claim to be experts in the "art"—the marketing campaigns, sales messaging, and branding. We ARE experts in the "science"—GTM strategy, process design, growth planning, and RevOps. On GTM Science, we share what we've learned by solving these problems at scale for B2B recurring revenue businesses. We also bring you unfiltered conversations with CROs, private equity investors, and revenue leaders who’ve done it themselves. No silver bullets. Just real talk about what works. Learn more at unionsquareconsulting.com

  1. 1d ago

    CRO Stories: 30% Higher ACV by Fixing Foundations and Layering AI with Duane Dufault

    Duane Dufault was staring at a trial registration flow that took ten days to get a lead in front of a rep, attribution data that was 80% wrong, and a founder who was ready to shut off marketing based on numbers that weren't real. He could have started layering AI on top of all of it and joined the chorus. Instead, he spent six months fixing the plumbing. The result: ACV up 30%, sales cycles cut by 30 to 40 days, and a foundation that actually made AI work when he finally turned it on. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds sits down with Duane Dufault, CRO of Time Doctor, for a conversation on how he drove a 30% ACV increase and cut sales cycles by 30 to 40 days in six months, why none of the AI work that followed would have been possible without rebuilding the foundation first, how his team uses AI prep agents to generate showstopper discovery questions, and the black swan churn problem he's trying to solve next. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 00:22 - The story: 30% higher ACV and 30-40 fewer days in the sales cycle 02:09 - Finding the biggest domino to knock down first 06:13 - Speed to lead was ten days and why 09:57 - 80% of attribution was wrong and the founder almost killed marketing 14:52 - Golden BBs, not silver bullets 16:38 - ICP as a living document that shifts every six months 25:44 - Use case over ICP definition 34:36 - Nothing in AI would have been possible without the foundation 35:43 - 50% of your time should be coaching 39:43 - AI prep agents and showstopper discovery questions 41:34 - The black swan churn problem: negative intent above your champion 46:40 - Why the CRO has to roll up their sleeves on AI _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    55 min

  2. 4d ago

    Why AI Won't Fix a Broken Go-to-Market Engine with Sangram Vajre

    Sangram Vajre has been asking rooms full of CEOs and revenue leaders the same question for the past year: how many of you are using AI? Every hand goes up. How many of you are seeing an impact? Every hand goes down. The disconnect isn't that AI doesn't work. It's that companies are layering it on top of a foundation that was never built in the first place. And no amount of copilots, agents, or automation is going to fix a broken ICP, heroic sales culture, or a go-to-market team that doesn't operate as a team. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds sits down with Sangram Vajre, CEO of Go to Market Partners, former CMO at Pardot/Salesforce, and co-founder of Terminus, for a conversation on why 99% of companies are using AI for efficiency instead of effectiveness, the CMO who got fired three weeks after posting record pipeline because it was built on the wrong ICP, five years of research revealing the same three problems killing every go-to-market org, and why the foundation has to come before the technology every single time. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 00:27 - The question that makes every hand go down 03:21 - Using AI to grow vs. using AI to cut costs 08:26 - Efficiency vs. effectiveness: 99% are focused on the wrong one 11:00 - Phase one vs. phase two AI and the foundation problem 13:07 - The GTM Operating System: eight questions across a thousand companies 25:50 - $35M pipeline, fired three weeks later 29:41 - Only 28% of pipeline is ICP fit 33:28 - The top three GTM problems that haven't changed in five years 41:37 - Heroic sales as the clearest sign of a broken foundation 44:11 - Revenue per employee as the AI impact metric 48:14 - Service-as-a-software: the model that's booming while SaaS struggles 52:08 - Do we still need Salesforce? _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    57 min

  3. May 29

    Optimizing Customer Expansion for B2B SaaS

    More than half of net new revenue last year came from existing customers. Yet most companies still treat expansion as a side effect of good relationships instead of a deliberate, measurable motion with its own process, capacity plan, and target list. The reason is simple: expansion is harder to measure than new business. There's no clean CAC payback formula for convincing your CFO to fund more CSMs, and the whitespace data your reps need to have intelligent conversations is probably sitting in a backend system they've never seen. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert break down how to build a real expansion engine, starting with why ICP needs to account for retention and expansion potential and not just acquisition ease. The conversation covers how Salesforce doubled customer spend within the first 12 months and the playbook behind it, product and stakeholder whitespace analysis, how to build a capacity plan for expansion the same way you would for new business, and why the crawl-walk-run version of customer health scoring is a CSV and a red-yellow-green column. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Efficiency Pyramid Framework GTM Ops Frameworks 01:28 - Why expansion gets ignored even though it's over half of revenue 04:52 - Where the execution bottleneck actually lives 06:19 - Healthy vs. unhealthy customers: two completely different playbooks 07:38 - Redefining ICP for expansion, not just acquisition 10:17 - How Eddie validated USC's ICP using nine years of customer data 19:43 - How Salesforce doubled customer spend in the first 12 months 22:29 - Product whitespace, stakeholder whitespace, and the CFO play 30:06 - What teams miss when they think they've already mapped expansion 33:17 - Single product vs. multi-product: why expansion looks completely different 39:06 - Who should own expansion and how to inspect it 41:07 - The expansion layer of the GTM Efficiency Pyramid 55:13 - Why AI can't replace the institutional knowledge problem _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    1h 5m

  4. May 26

    CRO Stories: How Fixing Segmentation Drove a 23% Win Rate Increase with Michael Maimone

    Michael Maimone walked into Lucid Link expecting to build on top of what was already there. The company had product-market fit, real market pull, and was growing. But when he looked under the hood, there was no segmentation model, no defined ICP tied to actual data, and reps were fishing in each other's ponds. Junior reps were working enterprise accounts while strategic reps chased mid-market deals. The data couldn't tell him what was working because the foundation underneath it had never been built. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Michael Maimone, CRO of Lucid Link, for a conversation on what it took to rebuild the go-to-market engine underneath a company that was already moving fast, the data modeling exercise that narrowed 200,000 accounts down to 50,000, how fixing segmentation drove a 23% win rate increase and 20% higher ASPs, the 30 enterprise MSAs that were sitting untouched, and why his biggest lesson was "don't start in the middle." Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 00:22 - Intro to Michael Maimone and Lucid Link 01:14 - What he thought the job was vs. what it actually was 03:51 - No segmentation: the first thing that wasn't there 05:36 - How bad segmentation corrupts every metric downstream 08:47 - Six months to get a clean baseline 10:31 - Rebuilding ICP from closed-won and closed-lost data 12:46 - 30 enterprise MSAs sitting untouched 17:18 - Capacity modeling: working backwards from the AOP 18:45 - 200K accounts narrowed to 50K 24:57 - 23% win rate increase and 20% higher ASPs 26:47 - Pipeline Council and the dropped trade show lead list 34:42 - "Don't start in the middle" _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    38 min

  5. May 22

    The Woman who Coined SaaS Says the Model is Breaking

    Amy Konary coined the term "SaaS" when she was an industry analyst at IDC. She sized the first market at $40 million, watched it grow into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry, and spent nearly two decades advising the companies that built it. Now she's watching the same dynamics that killed the perpetual license model start to eat SaaS from the inside: 6x renewal increases that customers won't absorb, AI features nobody's adopting fast enough to justify the price hike, and a generation of buyers who are starting to ask whether they could just build it themselves. In this episode, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Amy Konary, SVP of Marketing at Zuora and founder of the Subscribed Institute, for a conversation on why the extractive SaaS pricing model is hitting a wall, what symbiotic business models actually look like in practice, how to iterate on pricing without bloating your product catalog, the five-stage subscription maturity model she's used with hundreds of companies, and why your competitive moat matters more right now than your AI roadmap. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 01:19 - Intro to Amy Konary and how she coined "SaaS" 08:15 - Why the extractive pricing model is at its breaking point 10:39 - The shift to hybrid: platform fees, usage, and outcomes 12:49 - Trust architecture and the relationship fundamentals behind retention 19:02 - Why customers aren't adopting AI features fast enough 30:49 - AI features that are actually working right now 39:13 - Who should own pricing and how to iterate without chaos 42:07 - Why hybrid monetization models are so hard to operationalize 53:00 - The five-stage subscription maturity model 01:01:05 - What CROs should be paying attention to: your competitive moat _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    1h 8m

  6. May 20

    How to Quantify the ROI of Customer Success with Ben Murray

    Every CRO knows that retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. But when it comes time to ask the CFO for budget to hire more CSMs or invest in retention programs, the conversation stalls. New business ROI is simple math. Customer success ROI is not. The numbers are always moving, attribution is murky, and the CFO is looking at you wondering whether that $500K spend is actually going to move anything or whether the product team would have fixed it anyway. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds sits down with Ben Murray, The SaaS CFO, to break down exactly how to quantify the ROI of customer success investments from the perspective of the person who actually approves the budget. The conversation covers where CS should sit on the P&L and why it matters, the simple formula for comparing a CS investment against the retention revenue it would protect, why the compounding effect of saved revenue changes the math entirely, how CFOs actually evaluate the pitch when the data isn't perfect, and where to set the payback bar for CS the same way you would for new business. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Quantifying Investments in Customer Success and Retention (Ben Murray) The SaaS CFO GTM Ops Frameworks 00:36 - Why customer success is always underfunded 01:46 - Why CS ROI is harder to calculate than new business 05:38 - Where CS belongs on the P&L 07:40 - Splitting CS from account management 14:13 - The simple ROI formula: $500K spend vs. $5M saved 23:17 - Magic number, rule of 40, and the high-level barometers 27:36 - Breaking down the retention math step by step 32:37 - How CFOs evaluate the pitch when data isn't perfect 36:13 - Setting the payback bar for CS investments 40:18 - Weighted average cost of capital and the minimum return 44:14 - Segmenting your customer base to isolate CS impact _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    46 min

  7. May 15

    CRO Stories: The GTM Systems Behind Docebo's $230M Revenue Engine with Mark Kosoglow

    Mark Kosoglow has built revenue organizations at every stage; from a 100% commission territory seller to first employee at Outreach to CRO at Catalyst to founding Operator. Now eight months into running revenue at Docebo, a publicly traded LMS company doing $230M ARR, he's applying everything he's learned across both sides of the bow tie. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Mark for a conversation on the forecasting system that eliminated the "haircut of the haircut" problem, the enablement nine-box matrix that caps rep training at 20 points per quarter, how signal-based outbound took reply rates from 2% to 16%, why he inspects his own managers twice a year, and the post-sales framework he says most CROs completely ignore. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Mark Kosoglow's Rep Assessment Matrix (30 Minutes to President's Club) USC Frameworks 01:51 - What changed and what stayed the same across every CRO role 05:41 - From 100% commission seller to first employee at Outreach 11:37 - First 90 days at Docebo: observe first, then build 13:04 - 3% forecast accuracy and the system behind it 14:30 - The haircut problem and why most forecasts are fiction 18:33 - Inspecting the inspectors: coaching managers on deal reviews 19:27 - The enablement nine-box matrix 26:03 - Signal-based outbound: 2% to 16% reply rates 32:41 - Three reasons most outbound fails 35:22 - Multi-threading and why champions are a false sense of security 46:01 - The two frameworks behind every revenue org he builds 48:11 - Moments of Impact: proactive value creation in post-sales 50:36 - Why most CROs have no clue about post-sales _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    54 min

  8. May 12

    CRO Stories: Building a Relationship-Led GTM Engine with Jessica Robertson

    Jessica Robertson is 11 months into her first CRO role and she's building a go-to-market engine around something most revenue leaders talk about but never operationalize: relationships. After scaling Accessibly from under $10M to $50M as VP of Sales, she watched the outbound playbook she'd relied on for years stop working. The 1:1 capacity math that used to be predictable fell apart, and no amount of headcount fixed it. So she made the jump to CRO at an early-stage startup to build a GTM motion from scratch that treats existing relationships as a real revenue channel. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Jessica Robertson, CRO of Orb, for a conversation on what it looks like to build a relationship-led GTM engine from zero, the culture shock of going from a scaled org back to startup basics, how she uses network mapping to turn existing customers into new pipeline, why her curated dinner events convert when most events don't, and what she's learned about navigating sales and CS misalignment as the person who owns both. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: USC Frameworks 00:36 - Intro to Jessica Robertson and Orb 06:06 - From SDR to VP of Sales to first-time CRO 07:26 - Why she left a $50M org for a startup 12:09 - The culture shock of going back to ICP basics 17:05 - How relationship mapping actually works in practice 23:48 - Using your own product to build pipeline 29:14 - The GTM motions driving Orb's growth 31:19 - Why their curated events convert when most don't 36:09 - Tripling revenue as a year-two goal 42:41 - Advisors: Warren Zena and Bridget Winston 47:41 - Navigating sales and CS misalignment as the CRO _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    52 min
See All (112)

5
out of 5
9 Ratings

About

To us, GTM is both an art and a science. We don't claim to be experts in the "art"—the marketing campaigns, sales messaging, and branding. We ARE experts in the "science"—GTM strategy, process design, growth planning, and RevOps. On GTM Science, we share what we've learned by solving these problems at scale for B2B recurring revenue businesses. We also bring you unfiltered conversations with CROs, private equity investors, and revenue leaders who’ve done it themselves. No silver bullets. Just real talk about what works. Learn more at unionsquareconsulting.com

Information

You Might Also Like