From PLG to AI Agents in 40 Days

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video. Speaker labels are not included and some names and product terms may be transcribed phonetically.

[0:00] I've learned that the best founders are always selling. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast hosted by Rick Kleta. We uncover the strategies, the pivots, and the breakthroughs turning startups into giants. Let's crack open the vault and find out how. Welcome to GTM Vault, the podcast where we break down how top operators build go to market systems that scale. Today I'm joined by Brona Ballet, a proven leader in GTM strategy, marketing, sustainable growth. Most recently, Brona was VP of marketing at Glide, where she grew monthly signups by X, helped increase sales assisted ACV by text, and launched five AI agents in just 40 days. Before that, she led marketing at GoDaddy, scaling global teams across multiple business units, and previously held growth and operations leadership roles at Zenfits, KKR, Capstone, and BCG.

[1:03] Brona's sweet spot is turning complex products and fragmented markets into high-erforming scalable GTM machines, especially at the intersection of PLG AI and high velocity sales. We're going to cover what it takes to build GTM engines that compound over time, how to evolve from PLG to sales assisted, the future of AI and go to market, and how leadership and strategy need to evolve as companies scale. Bronco, welcome to the show. You know what I see a lot? Companies with solid strategy, but terrible execution. They've got dashboards, reports, tools everywhere, but no one knows what to actually do next to scale their business. That's why I've been paying attention to what Zoom Info is doing. They're not just the contact data company anymore. They built a full system of execution. They're calling it GTM intelligence and it actually works the list, writes the outreach and triggers the play. No guesswork, no manual grind, just pipeline moving, predictable growth strategy that actually delivers. Check it out at zoominfo.com.

[2:10] Thank you. Happy to be here. You've taken on GTM from many angles. strategy, growth, ops, brand. How do you define go to market today? That's a great question and I'll talk about how it was defined in the beginning of my career. So, when I started in in tech, it was a lot about like sales and marketing and a lot of that was was like on sales and if you had like a direct to consumer business, it was on marketing, but in B2B, it was a lot of sales and I think that things have evolved like a lot. I think today go to market is really about like how the business is going to grow and how you're going to like monetize your product. So to me go to market today it's really about the motion that you're going to choose right so are you going to be PLG are you going to be salesled are you going to be a combination or something else how are you going to staff sales marketing success and support and how these teams are going to work together so to me go to market today is a lot a lot broader and it's a lot about like how you're going to monetize your product and grow your business versus just like a sales and marketing dynamic.

[3:07] You said you love taking companies from one to infinity. What does that actually mean in your work? Yeah, so most of my full-time positions have been in businesses that already had product market fit or at least they believed they had it, right? In a couple cases, we realized we didn't have PMF or we lost it, right? Um, and I think the most important thing is like not panicking in those situations because in a startup or any company, I really think you can reinvent yourself and there's a lot of you can always go from zero to one again. So even if you feel like you were at one and you go back to zero because you lost PMF, you can go back to one. And so what I believe is to make a company go from like one to infinity, it's like if product market fit, you need to do a lot of zero to ones. Like for example, there are a lot of companies that they have a product uh but they don't have a marketing function. So they're not officially doing marketing. That's often what they say. Um and so you need to build a marketing motion. Some companies they grow without a sales team in the beginning. So then they need to build sales. You need to enter a new channel or start a new motion. And so I think that like for you to take a company to one to infinity, you need to love to do a lot of zero to ones. 0ero to one zero to one. And my main thing is like not getting a too attached on where you are today because everything is changing

[4:18] like really fast and you're not supposed to be like this is how you've always done it or this is what we want. It's you have to be open to always like trying something new and that's how you keep reinventing yourself and like keep growing. Looking back at your early stage GTM experiences, what do most teams underestimate during the 0ero to one phase? Go to market. Go to market for sure. I'm talking to a lot of founders now, mostly in the AI space, and a lot of them have been building their products with design partners and only after a few months or sometimes even a year building the product, they're now like, I'm now ready to start thinking about go to market. So my advice to these founders is don't start like thinking about go to market just after you feel like you have some type of product market fit or some signal. Start thinking about that like early on because it might change how you actually build your product or or the product that you build, right? Um for example, some products is like if you think about how you're going to grow it and you're going to have like a referral type of business or you're going to have users bringing more users, then you would build things differently. And so I'm not advocating for them to hire a marketer or a goto market person necessarily from the first day, but to at least have an advisor or someone to help them think about like the go to market for when they launch the product.

[5:32] So I think that's super important and that's the thing that I would tell them is like don't think about go to market as a second step. It's like the same step. At Glide, you helped grow signups, ACV and new product lines all at once. What did the GTM engine look like under the hood? Yeah. So, Glide was a PLG model like productled growth. Um, and so we staffed the marketing team accordingly. We had three main components of the business. We had self-s serve, partnerled and salesled. Marketing was directly responsible for the first. So, we were responsible for driving all the signups and the conversions for the self-s serve. And we also were responsible for the partnerled. So, these were the agencies, consultants that were using Glide to serve their clients. So we were responsible for these two things and also responsible for generating 100% of the pipeline for the sales team. Um and so we staffed all of that accordingly, right? So we had growth people, we had someone really focus on the partner audience, someone more focused on partnering with the sales team. So all that was kind of like very intentional to make sure that we were we were achieving that. Um and so we invested also in the channels accordingly, right?

[6:36] We invested a ton in SEO early on having Glide mentioned by other people. When LLMs came around, we really jumped a lot very quickly on like GEO or LLM optimization, however you want to call it. And we invested heavily in this partner audience, right? We knew that that was going to be a really big lever for us. Um, and that ended up accounting for 35% of our revenue. You talk about building revenue obsessed teams. How do you align marketing with pipeline and sales goals without making it feel transactional? Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I've always believed that if marketing is not contributing to to revenue, there's no point in doing marketing, right? I've had situations where um you know earlier in my career that I would be like, "Oh, this is my signup goal and I'm going to go and hit it." And then you hit it and some of your signups are low quality. And then you create all this dynamic with the sales team and the leadership team that despite you having a great top of the funnel, it's not translating into revenue. So, I learned very early on that that was just not going to cut it. because I've seen this.

[7:32] I've been for many years now really getting my teams to be very much focused on revenue. And so that's where I think the the the goal of the marketing leader is to figure out how do you then not every person on your team on your marketing team is going to directly contribute to revenue. Sometimes they're going to be one step removed, two steps removed. And your goal is going to be to think about how is the growth marketer what are the metrics they need to be looking for? Whether it's qualified traffic, signups, activation, conversion to paid, whether your PMM is talking about conversion rate on the website, um you know, whether my partner manager is looking at number of new partners or revenue contribution, you have to break down the metrics to something they can somewhat control or at least they need to be looking very closely to. And then you understand that those ladder up to revenue. And then I often I do revenue checks with my team like every week so they know where we are, they know how we're doing and that really helps them and they get really excited when they know we do something and revenue goes up.

[8:27] What was the most effective channel or motion at glide that surprised you? Co and LM for self-s serve. Um these were um you know when a lot of people have been saying like SEO is dead, SEO has been dead. SEO is going to die. uh and we invested a ton in SEO because there was a lot of search for people uh trying to build apps and a lot of long-term. So we invested on that early on and it kept like compounding. Um but then the great news for us is when LLM came around a lot of the efforts that we had already actually really helped us move much faster in the being served more often on LLM. We then started tackling some things more focused on LLM. So those are two that were like very very exciting and surprising in the sense of like everyone says SEO is dead but it still works and then go because it happened really fast. And then the other thing that was really successful for us is like really focus on ecosystem marketing particularly on our expert audience the agencies and freelancers and agencies uh and consultants building with glide. investing in those was really powerful for us because they were also this force multiplier that they kept talking about um our brand and so that was really powerful.

[9:36] You've operated in both productled and salesled orgs. What's the biggest myth about PLG companies that try to add sales? I think that some PJ companies are like I I don't need to add sales. If I have like really good PLG, my product is just going to sell itself. And um at least in my experience, you are going to end up adding sales right at some point in your career. So the main question is going to be what do you need your sales team to focus on? Um if you um if you focus them on like getting people that signed up to catch them early to teach them, maybe that's a problem, a product issue that you have. If you start to wait for them to kick the tires or if you wait for them to figure out the product or simply wait for them to raise their hand, I think it's really a matter of like there's no right answer for the business in terms of like a myth. I think it's like you will need sales. I haven't seen a business that doesn't need sales at all. But it's really going to depend on like a lot of different parameters of the business is like what is the ACV?

[10:31] How hard or easy is your product? Um and what do you want the the role of sales to be and is that going to be incremental? One of the questions that a lot of PLG businesses that I've been in have is okay, would this deal have closed regardless of whether of a sales touch, right? And so I think that's one of the things is like the myth I think is some people believe they don't need sales and I believe most of them will do. It doesn't necessarily need to be a really big sales team. When you transition glide toward more sales assisted revenue, what were the key changes to team structure or motion? Yeah. So the the main thing is when we really got like okay we're we're going to have to like generate real pipeline for the sales team. So the first thing that we did at the marketing team was we started focusing on sales pipeline generated. So we started tracking that which was a battle because we then depended on the sales team to enter the te deal size in the CRM and then we didn't have clear visibility and it took a few weeks to get that like in a really good place. Um but for sales one of the things that we did is before um really focused on sales we were kind of like we had these full cycle AES and they were doing qualification closing post sales including like account provisioning right so they were doing everything so one of the things that we decided was to invest more in sales we decided to

[11:43] invest in a little bit of specialization and that paid off a ton for us so we then really developed like SDR revops customer success so the AES were more focused on closing and they started closing a lot more and then the SDR was super efficient. RevOps brought a ton of value. So, uh for us that specialization even if it wasn't like massive teams across all these teams, it was really helpful for us. How do you see the role of revops when a company is evolving its GTM model? Well, my first job in tech was RevOps right back at Zen. So, has a very special place in my heart, right? I think RevOps can be really accelerate a go to market team. Often the people that you hire in RevOps, they're system thinkers. So they think about systems where people are like brute forcing a process often and they're great at like spotting and connecting tools to make it all more efficient and efficiency and go to market is often leading to more revenue, right? And so I think that revops is if you have the right revops person in place, they're just like helping you shape this new go to market model and helping enable it. And then if they move fast, you can just always be like with the latest processes and making sure that like there's no loss

[12:52] and everything is running really smoothly. So I'm a really big fan of RevOps. I I helped establish RevOps at Glide and I'm I'm a big fan of it. Glide launched five AI agents in 40 days. What made that execution cadence possible? Yeah. So I'll give you a little context on why we did that. So there are a lot of chat about AI agents in 2024. Obviously now in 2025 and everyone knows what AI agents are but at the time it wasn't super clear to everyone and we had already AI capabilities in our product that you could add to your applications and we were also about to launch our workflow product. We were getting not great traction talking about these separately. We were like hey you can add AI to your apps or you can build workflows or you can marry these and do workflows with AI steps. Um and it was kind of like hard for people who are not like hardcore builders to really understand what that meant. And so one of the things that we decided to do is like test like packaging these as AI agent solutions, right? And so I pitched that to our leadership team on a week. I believe it was like a Wednesday or a Thursday, something like that. Then I needed to have like a a clear day to think about it. So I worked on a Sunday on the landing page copy and then Monday and Tuesday I worked with the marketing team like design and development and the rest of the marketing team for the launch and then our internal glide builder that was building the agent. And we launched that on a Wednesday. So it

[14:07] was really like from a Sunday to Wednesday we launched our first one and we saw excitement right away right we saw customers asking about it and then we were like okay this is just like one first one so let's go ahead and launch like four more to just get a good chunk of that so speed was important for us because we were just trying to get signal so it wasn't like we were trying to kill anyone we were just trying to get signal much faster and each time we did a launch we got better from a product perspective and from a marketing perspective and so to me the secret to moving forward was like having a clear vision having fewer cooks in the kitchen in a very welloiled machine where every person knows what they're doing. I think like if you if we didn't have such a great team like the one we had, we wouldn't have been able to do it so fast. Which problems were those agents solving and how did you measure success?

[14:52] Yeah. So we the pro the the main audience that we were focused at the time was like operations audiences, right? So basically like the people in businesses that have they are managing a lot of people. They're doing a lot of repetitive tasks and so we wanted to do things that would solve their problems. So a couple things that we did were resume screening. A lot of these people have to hire a lot of people because they have a lot of turnover in their businesses. A lot of people have a lot of invoices to process. So we did another agent for that. A lot of them have a lot of contracts to manage. These were three of the agents that we launched at the time that saw a lot of success because they were solving a clear pain that these people had, right? Um, and so for us, measuring success was about like how people were just raising their hand and saying, "I want this." Um, and then like were we able to like sell them? Um, and that was really interesting because when we launched this, we actually thought that only our new prospects because we had a lot of traffic coming to our website were going to be interested and we were so shocked that our existing customers that knew how to build apps, they were like, "Please, I want this in my account." So, that was really exciting for us.

[15:56] What's your perspective on where AI adds the most value in GTM workflows today and where it's still overhyped? I think I think it adds value pretty much across the board and I don't think it's overhyped. I'll give you just a few examples of what we used it like pretty much across the board at Glide. Not everywhere but a lot. So we used it to create videos. We used it for voiceovers. We used to create images. Images were was one interesting thing because before AI we wanted to do a lot of photography because we didn't want to use all of like stock footage. But doing photography is very costly, right? A shoot can cost you anywhere from like 10,000 to $100,000. And so with AI especially because we we wanted to do some like in like shoots and stuff it really allowed us to have very interesting imagery that we didn't have before. Obviously the basic of like drafts and copy we did use a ton of research. We use it for lead scoring routing. We also used it for like we launched thousands of programmatic landing pages using AI. So we used it like really across the board um like from pretty much every angle. The problem that I see with AI is it needs a good manager, right? So yesterday I was talking to a CEO of a company and before I I hop on a call with him, I go to

[17:10] their website and you can tell very clearly that all the copy is AI generated, right? From the website to the blog post, every blog post started with like in today's fast digital world blah blah blah blah blah, right? And so and I was shocked, right? And I was talking to this the CEO and he's like, "Look, we only have one ma one marketing manager, but we can do a ton with AI." And I am a really big proponent of AI. Really am. But I think like it doesn't if the person deploying AI doesn't have like high standards and taste and it can really be detrimental to your brand. And so I think that like you you got to test and you're not always going to get it right. And for AI to be aligned with your brand, you have to like really be iterating on it, right? But like don't just sound like ChadByt because people can smell like it was Chad GBT from a mile away. Um and just a quick tip for people who are using AI for content.

[18:02] Just make sure that you spend human time on the intro. Then you know people are going to start reading and not think it's AI right away. You've led teams of five and teams of 80. How does your approach to GTM change depending on team size and stage? Yeah. So some things stay the same and some things change, right? So things that stay the same is like focus on goals and focus on revenue regardless of whether you're five or 80. You have to have that focus. The other thing is like focus on initiatives and programs that support those goals. Um so I hate when you have and I've seen a lot of organizations like this when you're like you're doing a lot of stuff and you have certain goals and you don't feel like they're connected at all. Regardless of the size of your team, it's the the role of the leader to be making sure that like those things are connected and then speed. I think that like regardless of how big or small your team is, you have to go for speed and speed looks very different and differenti team sizes.

[18:54] What changes? I think a lot of the rituals are different for smaller and larger teams. Um you need to usually when you have a large team probably it's just somewhat distributed. It's not everyone in the same location. So you have to account for time zones. have to account for. Um the the other thing that I find is when you have a really large team, you end up having different levels and then people need different levels of information and context to do their job. One thing that is really hard for me is like I like having all the context and I share a lot of the context with my teams and it works really well on smaller teams but when you start having a bigger team some people are like I don't need to know all the strategy, all the ins and outs. Some people are like, I just want to know this piece for me to go and do my writing or for me to go and do this thing on the website. So, it's it's balancing how much you share and not overshare and not to overwhelm. Yeah, that's that's a really good point.

[19:46] You worked closely with the CEO at Glide on or design and hiring. In your view, what should marketing leaders bring to the table beyond campaign performance? Yeah, I actually think marketing is like the glue in many businesses because we're thinking about prospects and customers all day long. We're testing what works, what doesn't. We're looking at metrics all day long trying to find patterns. And so the way that I like to do be a partner to, you know, my leadership team, not only to the CEO, is like how do I package all these insights not just as like marketing actions or marketing results, but more as like strategic insights that can shape where the business is going to go. So if we're like look we're not seeing this conversion rate anymore happening on paid is it because you know there are other competitors with better products in the market or is it we're attracting some different type of audience or hey we are getting some really good customers coming but because we don't have a big enough sales team to go and touch these accounts they're just not closing with us but the great customers are coming. So I think it's like really bringing it to the table more as like strategic insights and not just as like this is what marketing's job, right? So that that would be like my advice to people.

[20:56] You're now exploring what's next. What kinds of problems or teams are you most excited to work with in this next chapter? So I'm talking to a lot of founders now across all types of businesses, many of them in AI, right? Because there's a lot of AI. I've spoken with people doing like vertical SAS sport uh sports AI agent builders and a lot of founders in the AI application layer doing applications for lawyers for recruiters and for for different types of audiences. I get really excited about founders that have like a clear passion for the problem that they're solving or the customer they have picked because what I believe is that the solution changes over time. that we're seeing with AI is the solution might change because the technology is evolving so fast that what you pick today as something that is easy. It might not be the easiest thing in like a couple months. So, I love those people that are committed to solving the problem or committed to an audience because I know they will eventually find their way, right? And so, I love that. The other thing that I love is like founders who really see the value in go to market because I love coming in early and helping shape that. And so, I love I've I've tal I'm talking to a lot of technical founders and they're like, "We're engineers. we don't know anything about go to market. We know we need it, but we have no idea where to start. And so, I really like that. And just in terms of like I was I was kind of

[22:10] thinking about like what I can bring to the table. I read a really cool post yesterday and it talked about like two types of people. There's one type of person that is like there are barrels. There are people who want outcomes. You give them a problem, they figure out how to solve it, rallying teams, building the plan and shipping the results. They're like force multipliers, right? And you have ammunition. These are people that are task driven executors. They hit the target, but they need direction to plan or someone to aim. I am clearly a barrow. I'm like that force multiplier that if I have a team of like amazing people, I can go and rally them and we can go and ship a result. So that's what I'm looking for. Franka, this was incredibly insightful conversation from GTM model evolution to AI execution and team design. There's a lot for founders and operators to take away from your journey. For listeners, Anka has helped scale companies at nearly every stage from fast growing startups to complex global orgs. If you want to follow along with what she does next or go deeper on anything we covered today, check her out on LinkedIn at Brana Vallet. Thanks again for listening to GTM Vault. If you got value from this episode, feel free to subscribe, share, or drop us a note. See you next time.

[23:26] Tech founders and VCs careers lessons GTM