Today is my last day at Gong and if my work life were a book, I feel that Section 3 has come to an end (I think). Section 1 was various pre-sales technical roles, Section 2 was direct sales and Section 3 was post-sales/customer success/customer experience. Section 4 is my attempt to becoming an entrepreneur and bringing together all my experiences in GTM to tackle this next wave of innovation disrupting GTM teams.
I feel that tech companies are at an inflexion point -
Customer Success needs to be seriously reimagined. For those who don't know the origin of CS, here is the first write up I found on this topic. CS was created to tackle churn and has proven to be inadequate AND it is not the CSM. These are amazing folks doing amazing things, but it is the structure/organization/leadership that needs to come up with CS2.0.
B2B SaaS pricing needs to be rethought. The cost model is based on consumption and the revenue model is based on users. Cloud highlighted this challenge and now GenAI is going to make it even worse. As users use your product more, your costs go up but your revenue does not. Something has to give.
Sales in this churn and consumption oriented world needs to change. If selling was hard, getting customers to adopt and get value from software is harder. The sheer amount of technology that users have to use is too much and the change management too hard.
GenAI is going to be a huge disruptive force. We just don't know how or what the next few years will look like. That being said, we are at the ground level and have the opportunity to reimagine all aspects of GTM.
With all this going on, I did not feel up to going back to a regular job leading a CS team or going back into sales. Those were the two most obvious choices. Organizations have built up a skill debt in their CS and Sales functions and retooling Sales people to be outcome oriented, Sales leadership to care about the post-sales journey, building a CS function that scales is disruptive, building a product that drives outcomes etc. will take time.
Instead, my plan (and hope I have the courage to stick with this) is to run a year long experiment leveraging GenAI to start and run a business, work in a fractional capacity with organizations and using GenAI as a first class citizen in my engagements. The only way I know how to learn is to incubate and do and the goal is to build best practices on how to start a business and run GTM teams leveraging GenAI. Through this journey I will document what worked and what did not. There is a lot of hype around GenAI and my goal is to find where the technology is not ready and what best practices are.