AI as the Revenue Intelligence Layer

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. Today on GTM Ball, I'm joined by Michelle Shepard, chief revenue officer at Embers and one of the most accomplished revenue leaders in enterprise software. Michelle has scaled go to market organizations through every stage of growth from private equity transformations to multi-billion dollar exits. She's led commercial teams at Vertaor, Insuri, and PA. And now at Embers, she's helping redefine the future of finance and travel through AI powered expense intelligence. Across her roles as CRO, board member, and strategic adviser, Michelle has built repeatable GTM systems that align people, process, and technology, turning complexity into clarity, and strategy into predictable growth. In this episode, we'll unpack how she builds high performance revenue engines, drives

[1:11] alignment across functions, and scales predictability and fastm moving markets. 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 movie, predictable growth strategy that actually delivers. Check it out at zoominfo.com. Michelle, you've scaled GTM organizations through multiple high growth phases and successful exits. What are the consistent patterns you've seen in organizations that scale predictably and the common mistakes that hold others back?

[2:08] Rick, it's great to be with you here today and that's a great question. Part of what I do is to recognize the patterns starting from my early days as a leader in go to market at Gartner all the way through a number of software companies that you mentioned and the consistent patterns that I see are really those who focus on the addressable market. What are the targets? Where do you focus? How do you build that opportunity scorecard to help sales, to help marketing, to help product? really focus on the things that are important to prioritize to laser focus on the key priorities that are going to end with a successful win. That includes looking at the TAM. It includes the infrastructure underneath, the people in the roles, the people who are going to focus on the opportunities, the tools, which we're going to talk about a little more later, the tools to support everything that they do to be more efficient and to be very targeted, to reduce sales cycles, and to drive efficiencies. And then last but not least, strong operational processes across all the functions within a company. What hold others back is really

[3:21] not having a deliberate plan that aligns strategically with the thesis. What holds others back is not having not only those strategic levers but an execution plan aligned to those levers and aligning with everyone that is contributing to the success crossunctionally. Those interdependencies are absolutely critical. when you step into a new CRO role, how do you assess the state of the go to market engine in the first 30 or 60 days? So the first thing I do is develop a framework. A framework for my 30 60 sometimes 90 usually 30 60 uh and that framework is a lot of listening across all of the functional areas within go to market and I do that in a forum that I call an 8 by8. So I inviting people across go to market to hear about what's working to hear what new ideas they have to hear where there's opportunities to improve. I'll take that framework of the go to market and ask a lot of questions. And when I'm asking a lot of questions, I'm starting to fill out that strategy, to fill out that plan, and to develop something at

[4:29] the end, the 30, 60, or 90day review that really aligns with how people are thinking, how people are feeling, and most importantly, how to get everybody united behind the brand, united behind the go-to market strategy, and united behind the go-to market execution. You started your career at Gartner, bridging research, data, and strategy. How did that shape the way you think about modern revenue leadership today? Yeah, that was such a a foundational beginning for me. Obviously, Gartner is a a leading provider of research, analytics, and benchmarking in the tech industry. So just really a a you know a ground uh a grounding of learning uh from a leadership perspective as well as a technology perspective. So for me it was recognizing patterns. Although they were the leader in the market there were clearly opportunities to grow and expand the business and we looked at that really in three ways. One how do you retain and delight your customers? Two, how do you expand into business units and functions that may not be benefiting from the intellectual property? And three, developing that global united motion across all of the products and

[5:44] capabilities that Gardner had. And they took that pattern recognition to every role and to every opportunity, you know, going forward. You said that strategy, growth, and value are built through the daily efforts of people at every level. How do you translate that belief into an operating system that actually scales across departments? Yeah. So people are the foundation, right? So as I mentioned earlier, establishing the TAM is one thing. Getting the infrastructure, the right people with the right roles with the right expectations is incredibly important. But the second thing is behind the message, understanding the why, the how we're going to accomplish our goals. So goal setting is super important across the or establishing the brand message, the key pillars of differentiation and all the foundational messaging and content that is required to support that. So putting those enablement plans in place, getting people to deeply understand why we're doing what we're doing and what we're going to accomplish as a result. And

[6:51] whether you're in development coding the application or you're frontline and center in marketing or sales, having that unity behind the goals strategies of the company is absolutely critical. At Embburst, you're leading one of the most datadriven transformations in enterprise finance. What is AI native GDM look like inside a company serving global enterprises? Well, AI is really changing the game, right? And it's come out of what you might refer to as, you know, the trough of disillusionment. The maturity and the rapid evolution of AI is enabling not only our products and capabilities, what we deliver to our customers and to the industry, but it's having the same impact internally. So at Embers, we are forwardinking. We are innovative. We have created an enterprise platform, an enterprisegrade platform with the security and the compliance needed to develop an AI powered product capability for our customers. Everything from reading receipts to planning your travel to categorizing and itemizing your hotel folios as just some example and using AI powered intelligence to read those

[8:01] invoice to read those receipts in a more accurate way rapidly contributes to what's next right so the accuracy that we are developing as a result is phenomenal we're reading over a million transactions a day That contribution actually allows for us to become more accurate, smarter, faster in the use of AI, which enables us to really focus on core capabilities for our customers and really to drive the industry forward. We can be more predictable rather than reactive. You know how hard it is to do an expense report. It shouldn't take any time at all. Our goal is to leverage AI to provide an AI powered touchless experience so we can focus on the traveler. we can focus on, you know, the tech stack. We can focus on uh all of the internal uh account payable functionality uh and everything else will happen seamlessly. So, we provide more capacity and efficiency for our customers. We're seeing 30% faster processing, 40% higher audit accuracy as a result because we're doing everything from the beginning rather than at the

[9:11] end. And we're seeing over 25% cost reduction across travel expense and payables. So as the market evolves, we're setting the standard for what we're calling intelligence. Intelligence finance combining AI automation and an open architecture that allows us to partner to move faster to manage costs and to scale with precision. We're not just automating workflows anymore. We're building the intelligence layer underneath that powers the future of enterprise finance. Now on the flip side, right, we are using AI quite extensively internally. We're using it across all of our tools and applications. We're using it with our forecasting. We're using it in our capabilities with marketing, our techsack. We're selecting our tech sack and swap swapping out our tools and capabilities that actually aren't bringing all of those AI capabilities together so that we have this intelligent portfolio to make people faster, smarter, and quicker. Examples of that are, you know, the way that we leverage our enterprise chat GTP. So, we're sharing all of the content, the messaging, the product road mapaps, the development across all different

[10:26] functions. So people are very very equipped to address anything that they need to address and go to market. So learnings there would be create that ground swell. Start with recognition, train on the personalization, get people actively inspired to use chatp and other internal AI applications. Those are the things that are helping us move really fast internally. And then we continue to reinforce that through innovative showand tells. In marketing, we're using demandbased to tell us who to send what to when, getting our overviews to our target accounts. We're seeing enormous ROI, creating 5,000 scored MQAs, and saving 20 minutes per account. and AE research Google notebooks. We had a problem showing sales what's in Marquetto without spending a fortune on licenses, podcasts, writing rules. We're seeing ROI of over 100,000 saved in Marquetto licenses. We're using Hey Jen consensus, which is super cool. The problem was leaders had limited time and language sets. There was need for more

[11:37] video content. We're saving every single day on recordings and translations and providing efficiencies for all of our leaders time, hours and hours a month. With Goldcast, we're producing highquality webinars on demand videos and social media snippets. Outcomes, at least K saved on video editing every single time. Insanity. Our problem was all text metadescriptions, multiple language sites were global. We're in 120 countries. We're in 170 currencies. Multiple language sites and translations are key and critical to how we operate and connect across the globe. So for there, we're saving every single day in those translations, time in the back office, uh, and five at least five minutes in our webpage development. How do you balance innovation with predictability? Giving teams room to experiment while keeping the revenue model consistent and measurable.

[12:37] Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, we talked a bit about marketing and we talked about some of the back office and some of the things that we're doing internally to serve up this enterprisegrade platform. But as it relates to predictability and the ability to experiment and be creative, we're doing a lot of different things. We're using to win uh for coaching and practice for our sales and solution consultants to improve their presentation skills, their negotiation skills, and we're seeing about 10 hours a month for leaders, coaches, and enablement to leverage. We're using um chatbot playbooks to update and hire uh our SDRs which is pretty incredible. The ROI there is about 270 plus meetings booked proactively. Nooks cold calling only those who pick up versus calling calling hang up hang up hang up right and then with Gong um we're leveraging their AI capabilities for our forecasting predictability and accuracy.

[13:42] People can actually see where their activity is, where they need to make more connections, how impactful they are, how their journey is a mutually agreed sequence of events. The creativity part is important. giving people not only the education which we talked about earlier but the tools to practice, the tools to get the confidence, the tools to refine their skills and continue to invest in their own professional development. You've led both horizontal and vertical GTM motions from payments to insure techch. How do you decide when to go broad versus doubling down on an industry vertical? Yeah, that's a very good question. Thank you. In every case, whether it's a horizontal technology or a vertically specific designed technology, where we started in terms of that focus and how to align in their language, in the domain, in the industry, in the line of business or the function, aligning with that is absolutely critical in that targeting, in the messaging we create, in the practice that we talk about and the professional development we talk about. So everything that we do in marketing, in sales and even in our own

[14:57] product development, prioritization, we are looking at the target market, the ideal customer profile, those who are going to receive the benefit of what we do. So whether it's horizontal or vertical, being very targeted and explicit about an industry, a business unit, a segment, small, medium, large, they have different needs. Some are more complex, some are more simplified. We're creating those talk tracks, those playbooks for every single one. Whether I was at Gartner, whether I was at any of those vertically softwarebased companies or even the horizontal technology providers. When you unified sales, marketing, customer success, and product at companies like Vertaor and Insur, what were the first steps you took to align those teams around one GTM vision?

[15:47] Yeah, I think that's really important. I think the first thing and I just went through this exercise again as we look forward to doubling down again in 2026 here at Embers is bringing those leaders together in a forum and really helping them align on the thesis. What are the goals of the company? How do we develop those strategic levers and then what do we do together crossf functionally to execute on those plans? So it's important to hear from the leaders in their words what they're seeing in the market, what they're seeing in terms of competitive threats, what they're seeing evolve in technology so that we can share that information holistically and align in a unanimous way to build that plan and then really focus on that plan and hit the ground running. In a couple of weeks, we're doing the same thing. We started with GTM and now we're aligning hands with our product and engineering teams in the beginning of November so that we can all cement what the strategy is, what the goals are, what the strategic levers are, and then plan out month, quarter, year, what we're going

[16:58] to accomplish, how we're going to accomplish it, and who's responsible for what. And in your view, what are the GTM metrics that leaders still measure the wrong way in 2025? Oh, there are a few. Um, I think first and foremost you really need to look uh at the segments uh and you need to understand uh you know the the industry implications. So some of the things that a typical uh person might say is a is a key KPI one KPI without the relation to another KPI can be a big mistake. An example of that would be everybody says we need 3x pipeline, 4x pipeline, but without the understanding in those geographies, in those segments, in those industries, what the implications of, you know, deal cycles are, win rates are, you know, that alone isn't going to be a metric that you can develop a plan to. So that's just one example. Another example might be, you know, activity. There are different forms of activity and we capture all of that activity through

[18:08] outreach and in gong. Sometimes the activity is going to be high velocity right in our with our SDRs or BDRs. Uh it's going to be high velocity in the small business market. get one shot. That message better be on. You align to the problem statement, the capabilities needed, the solutions you can deliver, and you provide a solution for them pretty fast. When you start to move up market, you know, that might take a longer discovery time. Really digging in deep to the technical requirements, the infrastructure they have, the complexity in the workflows. So really looking at these key elements in terms of activity are equally as important. And the way we do that is we've designed our sales process aligned with those segments, those geographies, those verticals so that every gate there's a clear understanding of what's needed to move to the next gate. In addition to that, what are the credibility points? What are the tools? what are the deliverables that you need to provide in order to know that you're now mutually in

[19:19] agreement to go to the next stage. So all of that has been designed and inherent with our within our CRM and configured with all of the AI tools that we use. And think about it, because we're using AI across the enterprise, all of that intelligence comes in quickly into the sales process so that people people can be more focused, they can be more efficient, they can be more right solving customer problems, prospect problems, and coming up with the right fit, the right solution that will deliver value continuously. You've partnered with firms like Bane, EQ2, EQT, and Advent through your advisory work at Macrolab. What GTM blind spots do you see most often and PEback portfolio companies?

[20:06] Yeah, you know, I think a lot of it is dependent on the portfolio company, but where I've been able to help kind of goes back to those patterns, right? is that gut check not only across go-to market functions. It's the analysis across those go-to market functions but also the interdependencies in and other functions. Do we have the right message in the market? Are we going after the ideal customer profile? Do we have the right addressable market? And how does that align with the infrastructure and the organizational design? I've seen a number of companies not spend enough time on how they've designed their organization and go to market to enable them to achieve their goals quicker faster. You know that does come down to having people in the right roles with the right definition. Examples of that when you have I call it role creep. When you have people who are doing customer success, sales, consulting all at once, you're not going to get the end result.

[21:09] You're not going to get the focus. When you have people in their core competencies leaning in as a team, you're going to move faster, you're going to move smarter, and you're going to deliver something that's more meaningful for your customer and for the market. For founders or execs entering a private equity environment for the first time, what's the right way to approach ETM due diligence both before and after the deal? Yeah, I'd say focus on scale. What got you there before isn't going to be what gets you there to scale. I've seen founders going back to even my my gardener days come in and they've had amazing success, right? They've created a great product. They they've brought in profitable income and now it's time to scale. So leveraging, you know, shared services, those resources across the company, super important. So many times they want to do things the same way they did them before. Remember those multiple hats we were talking about before. You see that pretty consistently in in smaller founder businesses because that's how they had to start. They didn't have the funding to support the

[22:19] focus in those specific roles. So I'd say, you know, that's that's piece of advice is to be more open-minded about how you scale and grow, how you develop a go to market plan that might be a little different in terms of how you got there before, but it's a plan that's going to help you scale exponentially. How do you balance investor expectations for short-term returns with the long-term scalability that sustainable GTM systems require? Perfect. That's a great question. Let's start. We'll start with marketing. When I think about the customer life cycle, it starts with driving awareness. Whether you're driving awareness to your customers about something new that you're doing, new capability prospects where you're driving awareness to your differentiation. It could be to industry experts, analysts, uh it could be for podcasts like this or the news. We start there, right? And short-term expectations, right? Right? We have to drive a certain number of MQAs. We have to get X number of SAOs over the line into the hands of our sellers. We have to build on the brand, the messaging,

[23:29] the content expectations shortterm and long-term. Shortterm, everyone's got to be on message. We need a united front and agreement across the company. So, that's super important short term and then fluidity throughout the cycle. longer term might be in the segments that we play right in some cases in the small market we're producing in period opportunity and what I mean by that is opportunities that are brought into the cycle and closed within a month in mid-market that gets a little bit longer right in some industries that might get longer as well that might be 3 to 6 months in the enterprise space that could be anywhere from 9 to 12 to 18 months before you get through the entire cycle So, I think it's super important to know that you need to have short-term impact.

[24:19] We need to deliver every single day, but we also need to be aware that some things require more time. There's more complexity uh and there's, you know, different functions that need to contribute to the scale that we expect to see longer term. And once an exit happens, what's the key to maintaining cultural and operational momentum inside the organization? That's another great question for me and you know I've been fortunate to go through a number of successful exits and then with new private equity partners and it's that next stage of scale and I love the question because it's similar to the founder question you just asked, right? We have an organization that did phenomenal things. They achieved their goals. They're attractive to new investors. We're going to infuse this with funding to get to the next level of scale. But the same message, the same message. We can't get to their way the same way we got there before. So bringing everyone together again, educating on the thesis, doing the work across leadership, leadership in every single gotom market function and

[25:30] aligning with those interdependencies and other functions like finance, product, engineering, human resources, right? How are we going to build worldclass talent to carry us to this next stage in the journey? So a lot of that is the work that we discussed earlier, but it's also the messaging internally. I highly recommend and I learned this I learned this over time. Internal reinforcement of the message is absolutely critical. It's not a oneandone. It's not we all lock hands. We agreed on the strategy. We agreed on the strategic levers and the execution plan. We're done. It's having those checks and balances on a regular basis and reinforcing the messaging, reinforcing the wins along the way, reinforcing our progress, and most importantly, managing that performance in a positive way, right? We're managing performance against the goal, against the plan. You're never going to get it perfect every time, but where there are gaps coming together, how do we address those gaps? What we should we continue doing? And another big one is what do we stop doing because we're not getting the results that we expected.

[26:36] Adam Burus, you've been vocal about the idea that AI turns data into direction. How is AI transforming the way you and your teams approach GTM strategy? Yeah. So, you know, I described the a lot of the different tools which make our quicker make us quicker, faster, smarter, but I'd also like to say more predictable. It's almost like we're drinking our own champagne, right? In the past, the applications in travel and expense management were really looking in the rearview mirror. Now we have a proactive view. AI has enabled us to provide more accuracy, matching risks, risks earlier, giving direction so that people follow policy and a big bonus in addition to that is reporting capabilities and audit. I can now see is my T& budget aligning with what we're spending real time as an example. Are the marketing events that we're investing in providing the return on investment that we expect back to the what we should continue to do more of and what should we stop doing? Are my

[27:45] people following policy and am I making it easier for them? Are they spending less time doing these administrative things that now AI can do for them? Right? AI can do the categorization, itemization, the receipt capture lightning speed. They're spending less time doing their expense reports and more time focusing on their jobs, their roles, their responsibilities, and taking our performance forward. So, what does it take to embed AI insights into workflows, not just for finance teams, but for sales, marketing, and customer success as well? Love that question. And it really does align with the unification, right? Stop operating in silos. Establish a blueprint and make sure that there those connections are happening across the company. We talked about a lot of tools in go to market, but we're using tools and product. We're using tools in customer success. We're using some of our own tools in finance and across the organization as I mentioned. But that blueprint is absolutely critical. If people are operating in silos and not

[28:54] sharing information transparently, we lose pace. We fall behind. We might not be aligned. We might be making investments in tech that could be repurposed or used across the organization as one example. We might be missing information that's critical to our success in any given function. That's another example. And we may not encourage collaboration. AI really gives us an opportunity to spend more time collaborating across the organization to be successful versus some of these, you know, more administrative tasks or reworks I call them. Having a holistic view of your AI blueprint across functions is absolutely critical to unite the team and get the best efficiencies available to you versus operating these different functional areas and not integrating those tools in a meaningful way. You know, I speak to a lot of technical founders like two engineers will come up with an idea and they'll yeah take it to market, get some early traction, get some VC money, and then they'll contemplate whether to bring in a CRO or dedicated leaders for

[30:04] each one of the revenue generating departments. How would you advise them to go about it? And I I'm sure this is kind of based on the stage of maturity they're at, but they often are hesitant to give so much responsibility to one person within the organization. Any any kind of insights you can share there? Yeah, I think it's absolutely critical to align leadership with development, go to market leadership and with product in addition to the obvious, you know, the finance, the forecasting, the budget, you know, really allowing someone to get into the weeds of what we're providing in the market and giving them the insights to how that is resonating in the market. So I think it's important that there's collaboration and engagement across those different functions. So let's say it's two engineers, right? They've built something that people are buying and using and seeing value in. How do you get to the next level of scale might require more discovery, more investigation? So you know, you're never going to get 100% behind the doors of your organization.

[31:18] You only know the information and intelligence within the walls of what you're working on and the base of customers you have today. Getting the market insight is super important. We used to have and they still have it. I believe we called it the stalking horse methodology. Right? And I'm a big believer in that. Right? What we do is we're building based on what we know. all of the data, all of the intelligence, all of the feedback, whether you're in a revenue role, product role, an engineering role, a finance role, we're we're placing our bets. However, until we go out to market, the horse goes ahead of the herd. What are the conditions? Are there threats, right? Are there predators? Is there enough water? Is there enough food? Is there enough shelter for me to bring this group to this next step in the journey? That's what the stalking horse is for, right? So I think opening your mind to collaboration is really really important and transparency and creating these feedback loops so that you can get to a level of accuracy in the decisions that you're making that are far better than everything you just

[32:26] have inside the walls of your organization. So I think I think it's important that and it might be hard right to give up a little bit of control but if one person is doing all the selling love and care and feeding of the customer all the marketing and then developing the software themselves they're not going to you know have that opportunity to grow the business to the degree that they're capable of. When you talk with customers what are they most excited about? Is it speed, accuracy or visibility? Well, I think uh I think people generally get a little afraid of speed. That's a really good question. However, when they see it in action, you know, they get super excited. So I'd say speed comes after the excitement of can you provide me something that makes me more efficient, makes me more predictable, creates a level of consistency and automation that helps us operate far better than we have before. So I think once you get through those phases of how do I help you be more effective in your market, you now have a competitive advant advantage. Can you be more efficient? Right? Can you do more with less and better than you did

[33:42] it before? And then how do we, you know, how do we continually add value with the confidence that we're going to continue to invest? Those things come first. Showing the credibility that you can do those things are important and then they get excited about speed, right? When can you do the next thing and how fast can you implement? So I would say it works really in that order. What advice do you give GTM leaders who want to adopt AI but feel overwhelmed by complexity or data quality issues? Yeah, I would start you got to get started somewhere, right? So, look at your tech stack. Look at what's working. Look at where you know people are spending too much time doing things that aren't relevant to their roles, responsibilities, and the expectations you've given them. Take a blueprint of what you've got in place, identify areas where AI can improve across each of the functions and create your own blueprint is I guess the starting point. Socialize that with the whole company so everybody's on the same page with we are always going to be looking for faster,

[34:50] better, smarter ways to support our people. Train on the personalization. It's not just implementing AI and looking at a screen and wahoo, here we go. Right? Encourage people to train. Encourage people to use their creativity to take AI to new heights. Create collaboration across functional. Make sure that that information is shared across or accessible across the organization. And I strongly encourage recognition uh and showand tell. We recognize we hold trainings every week, lunch and learns. We recognize our people or teams of people who are working on these innovations. We share those in our go to market all hands and our company town halls. We are dedicated to it and we have consistent cadences to make sure that we're continually improving the opportunity that we're investigating new ways encouraging that creativity and that we're super consistent on recognizing everybody who is you know contributing to to that initiative. also capture the ROI with any new technology.

[36:02] That business case is super important. But we make sure that we are looking at the efficiencies, capturing those time saves. We're making sure that when we add value, we're capturing that in some way, shape, or form, and that we can convert that to how do we deliver value, quantifiable value back to the company. And as you look ahead, what do you see as the next frontier? is a predictive orchestration, human AI collaboration or something else entirely. I I would play place my bets on we're we're already in the midst of the collaboration and we've talked a lot about that here, right? The predictive orchestration is the thing that gets me excited the most. I think of AI is giving people the opportunity to open other compartments of their brain.

[36:54] Right? You've seen a lot written about it's time to use, you know, EQ. It's time to explore the creativity, you know, that brings you to that next level in a disciplined way, of course, but enabling a predictive orchestration means I don't have to think about following policy, right? Because I'm being directed, inspired to do it, even though my behaviors and preferences are now taken into consideration. AI enables that, right? So, my preferences, my behaviors, I'm having a more enjoyable experience while doing the right things, right? Taking the sales cycle from one step to the next to the next to the next, taking our marketing campaigns and initiatives through their cycles faster.

[37:42] AI has a big part to play in that and helping us to get more predictable, right? Who are we targeting? How do we know we're hitting the right messaging? How do we know it's resonating? All of those proof points coming together with the intelligence, the reporting, and the automation, that predictive orchestration, you know, back to that touchless experience. Rather than keying in information, I'm gathering all the facts, and I'm able to execute in a way that's far more effective and efficient than I've ever been before. What are your thoughts on the adoption or the evolution into egentic workflows? Do you think enterprises will eventually adopt these systems and uh you know would it lead to a mass reduction in headcount? I you know I do think that aentic AI is already being adopted. We're seeing that in our platforms today, right? You know, I I described an enterprisegrade platform that enables, you know, these large lang language modules in a secure way, in a compliant way is the

[38:48] foundation by which you start. Agentic becomes a natural next step, an evolution that makes you smarter, quicker, faster. you know, the the experience I I described earlier and, you know, now we're being guided along the way, you know, versus all of the administration work that we had to do before, you know, whether we were doing it in an automated workflow or not, or whether we were doing it manually, even worse. So, I think that the adoption will happen fast. I think what it'll lead to in some roles, yeah, it's going to be headcount reduction, but it's also going to open up, you know, new opportunities for other roles because as you scale, case in point, I doubled down on the go to market team last year. I'm doing it again this year. Putting the right tools in place, processes, leveraging the technology in a meaningful way, not just buying it and leaving it there. collaborating across the company actually opens up opportunities for you know new roles, new responsibilities, a new way of thinking. So I think it's less of be afraid that some jobs might be replaced

[39:56] to some degree with AI, but it opens up enormous opportunity for other roles and other capabilities in the market. You built and led global revenue organizations through massive change. What does a high-erformance revenue culture look like in 2025? High performance revenue culture. We have one. We definitely have one. I think it really goes back to getting everyone on the same page. The mission, the vision, the goals, the strategic levers, all of the execution crossunctionally and creating an environment culturally where people know the why, right? They know the why of the company. They know the why of the function or business unit. They know how they're making a difference, how they're contributing to that vision, that thesis, really spending the time uh to get that alignment and what I'll call unonymity, right? We may not all agree on the tactics, but together we're going to make a decision and we're going to move forward. So I, you know, I feel like

[41:04] we've created that culture here at InBeers and I've been able to create that culture in many other places, but it takes time. It takes investment. Uh, and once you put the right frameworks in place and cadences in place and you've really listened to your people and help show them the way, you'll get the results. You'll get them there fast. And with every transformation, I learn a little bit more, right? and learn where the patterns are, where we're going to have the naysayers, the people in the middle, the promoters, the champions, the ambassadors, and how do we all come together to get everybody there? With every transformation, I figure out the learnings, right? Well, where is there opportunity to improve and how do I go even faster? How do I accelerate that in the next situation? Whether it's the next stage in the journey, you know, where I am, uh, or it's, you know, a new challenge. How do you coach emerging GTM leaders to balance operational discipline with creativity and vision? Yeah, a lot of that is cadence, right?

[42:05] Having a structure in terms of, you know, how do you organize your day, your week, your month? It's also reflection, right? Reflecting. I'm a big believer in reflecting every day on, you know, how the day went. Did I accomplish everything that I expected to? But also that rigor around the plan, right? We do the quarterly business reviews. We do pipeline forecasts. We do um marketing campaign analysis. We probably measure everything and everything you could ever imagine. But don't get stuck in the minutia. You know, come back to the plan. Align those things that you are seeing in your environment, how you're performing, and bring it back to the plan. Bring it back to the goals, the strategy, the execution, and make sure you're giving time to the right things. So prioritization is super important, time management is super important and collaboration, investing the time crossf functionally to make sure that those interlocks are happening help you balance you know all of the things that you have to do both strategically, creatively and and you know we all have to do uh tactically.

[43:15] What's one leadership belief that's evolved for you over time? I'm a you know a huge a huge believer in I'd say collaboration is probably you know the biggest one establishing the right culture the right mindset in addition to all the academics and frameworks we just talked about but really getting into you know the hearts and minds of you know the people in the organization and making sure you know they're along the journey and that they're committed to the journey. Uh so I'm a big believer in that. I'm also a big believer in, you know, when you are testing, when you're testing creatively, that you fail fast. It's super important not to continue to do the same thing over and over for a long period of time when it's not working, unless you've planned it out, right, for 12 months or 36 months, etc., and you're seeing progress along the way. But when something's not working, it's important to to pull the plug on it before you spend a lot of people's time, money, and effort in something that's not going to result in progress for those teams and quite frankly doesn't inspire them.

[44:19] And if you could go back to your early Gartner days, what advice would you give yourself about building scalable GTM systems? That's a good question. And I and I have definitely thought about that. I think it's important and and it's kind of like um consciously you know unconsciously competent in a way right um the thing that I started to fine-tune was the pattern recognition how do all the pieces fit together versus you know looking at one silo the next silo the next silo right looking at marketing standalone looking at sales standalone look at product development and construct standalone looking at, you know, retention, looking at the financials across all of those things. I think, you know, I was pattern recognizing I was recognizing the importance of those patterns and bringing them together and then repeating them in the right way for the next thing. And becoming conscious about that versus unconsciously confident about that, I think really made a difference for me as I moved on to new roles and new companies. I'd like to now move on to the rapid fire section of the

[45:30] pod. One GTM metric that deserves more attention right now. One GTM I think it's industry specific really looking at a deeper dive in vertical challenges in this macroeconomic environment and how do we reassess uh you know those cycles whether it's in marketing or it's in in sales. That's a big one. Hardest but most valuable lesson you've learned as a CRO. It's important to evolve. What worked before may not work now. And it's important to listen. It's important to invest in hearing what's going on on the ground, what's working, new ideas, and where there's opportunity to improve. Most underrated function in a modern GTM team. Enablement. Enablement is the most underrated function. building out enablement tools, messaging, refreshing that content, all of the roleplaying engagement, not only with your new hires that are coming in, but that reinforcement of training, especially in a rapidly changing technological environment is super important.

[46:34] A book framework or tool that's shaped how you lead. There's so many books. I'm reading one right now by Simon Synynic, Leaders Eat Last. There isn't one book. Kind of back to there isn't one way to do things. You're not going to get there the way you got there before. So, I'm a big believer in consistently refreshing myself on frameworks that worked, lessons learned from those who might have gone before me, uh, and a conscientious effort to improve as a leader every day. In one sentence, the future of enterprise GTM is the future of enterprise go to market is a collaborative environment where it's super simple to understand where you stand, where your goals are, where what the impact is on the industry that you serve. It's an environment where you have access to information so that you can continually improve predictably and real time. Michelle, thanks for joining me and for showing us what it looks like to lead with precision, empathy, and datadriven conviction. From billion-dollar PE transformations to AI powered GTM at Embers, your playbook shows that great go-to market leadership

[47:49] isn't just about process. It's about clarity, alignment, and execution at every level. If this episode helped you rethink how leadership data and strategy intersect in modern GTM, subscribe to GTM Vault, share it with your team, and join us next time as we explore how today's operators are building the future of growth from 0ero to one and beyond. Thank you so much, Rick. It was a great pleasure to be here with you today. Tech founders and VCs, careers, lessons, GTM