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

    How Steven Birdsall Built a €1B Business Inside SAP When Everyone Said It Would Fail

    Steven Birdsall walked into the SAP boardroom and asked for €20 million to build an entirely new business unit. The pitch: take everything SAP was known for — complex, expensive, long implementations — and package it into fixed-scope, fixed-fee solutions that customers could be live on in ten weeks or less. The board said yes. Then every sales rep, every consultant, and every partner told him it would never work. He was zero for three on internal buy-in before he ever sat down with a customer. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Steven Birdsall, CRO of Alteryx, for a conversation on how the first customer conversation changed everything, the operational playbook behind scaling from zero to 1,000 packages in 18 months, the comp plan accelerators that got SAP's field team to sell it without being forced, how McLaren became the proof point that transformed the business from push to pull, and why the same lessons apply to every CRO trying to figure out AI right now. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 00:22 - Intro to Steven Birdsall and the SAP story 01:11 - The €20M board pitch and the thesis behind it 04:21 - 60 days to build a business from scratch 05:44 - Zero for three: sellers, consultants, and partners all said no 09:12 - "You had me at hello" — what happened when he talked to customers 09:57 - 100 packages built internally, partners built 900 more 11:20 - McLaren: 11 packages that transformed an entire business 12:14 - €1B in 2.5 years 13:00 - The operational plumbing behind scaling the business 18:51 - Turning sellers into ambassadors through joint customer meetings 21:59 - How partners went from skeptics to building their own packages 24:58 - Fast time to value: the lesson that applies to AI today 34:04 - From doubling every quarter to annual-to-quarterly quota shifts 45:17 - The playbook for any CRO launching a new motion today 50:09 - The revenue leadership story he doesn't get to tell enough _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    53 min

  2. 5d ago

    CRO Stories: Good Revenue, Bad Revenue, and the Churn That Helps You Grow with Jackie Rousseau-Anderson

    Jackie Rousseau-Anderson walked into a company approaching $100M and realized that the revenue everyone was celebrating looked very different once you layered in gross margins by segment. Some enterprise clients had been compressing margins for years because the sales team did whatever it took to keep them happy. The top-line number looked great. The profitability underneath it told a completely different story. So she did something most CROs won't: she intentionally shed millions in bad revenue, let unprofitable customers churn, and rebuilt the go-to-market around the revenue that actually had margins, lifetime value, and room to grow. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Jackie Rousseau-Anderson, CRO of InformData, for a conversation on how to run a gross margin analysis that reveals which customers are actually profitable, the behavioral segmentation model that changed how her team sold and serviced every account, how restructuring comp plans around good revenue shifted rep behavior overnight, why intentional churn drove net retention above 110%, and what she's learned working with PE firms like Vista and STG on scaling through these inflection points. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 01:27 - What happens when not all revenue is good revenue 05:00 - When to hit the pause button on celebrating every dollar 07:30 - Gross margin analysis by segment: what the data actually showed 10:20 - Behavioral segmentation: archetypes inside your customer base 13:06 - Training reps that it's okay to say no to a deal 17:35 - Restructuring comp plans to reward good revenue 20:47 - Sales process gates that reps actually appreciate 26:24 - Tying marketing to the good revenue segments 27:56 - Sales cycles down 10-20%, good churn reduced 15%, NRR above 110% 29:25 - Shedding millions in bad revenue on purpose 34:59 - Scaling with PE: Vista, STG, and international firms 40:40 - Biggest advice for CROs working with PE companies 44:15 - The soundboard metaphor: every knob affects another _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    53 min

  3. Jun 9

    CRO Stories: How AI Delivered 3x ARR Per Rep at QuotaPath with Ryan Milligan

    Ryan Milligan's team at QuotaPath hit 100% blended quota attainment eight of the past ten quarters. The way they got there wasn't by adding headcount. It was by looking at every step in the funnel where a rep was spending time on something that wasn't uniquely human, and putting AI on it. The result: reps went from spending 25% of their time selling to closer to 50%, and ARR per rep tripled. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds sits down with Ryan Milligan, CRO of QuotaPath, for a conversation on how his team uses Momentum to auto-update 75+ CRM fields from call recordings so reps can carry 40 deals instead of 20, the AI-powered multithreading play that gets senior stakeholders into deals on day 3 instead of day 73, and why the early "AI slop" false starts almost derailed the whole thing. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 00:22 - The results: 3x ARR per rep, 40% higher ASP, doubled win rate 01:37 - From data science to rev ops to CRO 03:41 - Reps spend 25% of their time selling — how to double it 07:34 - Team structure and sales motion at QuotaPath 08:35 - Is AI easier to implement in high-velocity sales? 13:29 - How Momentum auto-updates 75+ CRM fields from call data 16:49 - Why those 75 fields matter: the handoff problem 21:50 - Carrying 20 deals vs. 40 deals 24:15 - Prompts are everything and data for data's sake is noise 28:53 - What is Dust and how the micro-agents work 35:20 - AI-generated business cases and ROI narratives 42:27 - The multithreading play: day three vs. day 73 45:15 - Hallucinations and where to accept the risk 47:12 - The two things that drove the most impact _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    49 min

  4. Jun 5

    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

  5. Jun 2

    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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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5
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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

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