Jeanne DeWitt Grosser — built Stripe's early sales team, now COO at Vercel running marketing, sales, customer success, revenue ops, and field engineering — argues that the GTM playbook PMs grew up with is mismatched to how enterprise customers actually buy, and is becoming critical to get right because 'with AI, 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.'
The central reframes:
- 80% buy to avoid pain or reduce risk — not to chase upside. '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.' PMs writing pitches in vision-mode are selling to themselves.
- GTM is a product. '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.' The buying journey is the surface to design.
- The litmus test for sales hires. Grosser tells her sales team: '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 manager.' Translation: sellers who can't speak credibly to the technical buyer don't belong in the room.
- The GTM engineer is rising. New role; she says it's already enabling her team to operate 10x faster.
- Sales-time allocation. For 20 years, sellers have spent 30-40% of their time with customers. Agents and AI take the rote, hopefully shifting sellers to 70% of time on actual customer interaction.
For a mid-level PM: this is week-by-week practice. Stop pitching upside; pitch reduced risk. Treat your launch's buying journey like a feature surface. Write your next pitch deck so an engineer-buyer can actually use it.