What world-class GTM looks like in 2026

Jeanne Grosser, COO at Vercel and former Chief Product Officer at Stripe where she helped build early sales teams, discusses what a world-class go-to-market (GTM) function looks like today. The conversation covers the rise of the GTM engineer and AI-driven sales workflows, customer segmentation, treating go-to-market as a product, PLG versus sales-led growth, pricing, and sales hiring and compensation.

01Key learnings

• Treat go-to-market as an integrated lifecycle spanning marketing, sales, customer success, and support, mapping the jobs to be done from first awareness through long-term retention.
• Expect the buyer experience of being sold to to become a differentiator, so design the sales journey as a distinctive, valuable experience rather than a transactional pitch.
• Frame value around avoiding pain and reducing risk, since many buyers purchase to avoid downside rather than chase upside, especially enterprises.
• Hire a go-to-market engineer who understands sales craft, then have them encode your best human workflows into agents with a human in the loop; Jeanne's team cut an SDR team from ten to one this way.
• Use conversation analysis tools like Gong with agents to diagnose lost deals and coaching gaps, then run weekly sprints to fix go-to-market process bugs.
• Build segmentation on a few attributes (around three) such as company size, growth potential, and workload type, then use data to find which traits correlate with revenue.
• Add value at every touchpoint, even for prospects who do not buy, by offering insights and best-practice content, since lost customers often return years later.
• Make the sales org feel like a partner to product and engineering by having reps deeply understand the product so they can separate real market signal from noise.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.