Revenue Activation Is Architecture

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

[0:00] enablement as it is known now is dead in the era of revenue activation activating that revenue potential activating the potential of people that's where the key focus is shifting don't get me wrong we still have the content we still have the learning that's necessary but those are means to an end when I'm leveraging AI and leveraging it effectively it is possible to achieve explosive growth without commenurate growth in headcount this is the new norm going forward one shift that I would strongly recommend the GTM leaders to think deeply about this shift is Swedar Pedani helped define the customer success category before it even existed and now he's explaining why consolidation isn't actually innovation and what it really takes to build revenue activation in today's world getting two reasonably sized companies together making the company larger those are classic signs of category hitting its ceiling being large in fact works against you because the change management is really hard so the Young nimler companies are at a unnatural advantage in this era. A few months we get outdated. There's so many AI tools

[1:07] that are coming out. Those are areas where I would say that these are distraction. Any solution that is wellcraftrafted in the world of AI they're not point solutions. They're transforming the workflows altogether end to end with people who can leverage AI strategically. There are two things that are happening. A time savings and I'm also getting faster outcomes. So nonlinearity of growth is possible today for AI native businesses. When you talk about revenue activation as a leader of the company, I would really double down on welcome to GTM vault. Trusted by over 25,000 founders and operators building the future of revenue. Today's guest co-founded Gainsite before customer success was even a defined category. He helped name it, architect it, and scale it into one of the defining companies in modern B2B. Now, as co-founder and CEO of GTM Buddy, he is doing it again. This time, the category is revenue activation. Two of the largest sales enablement platforms just merged. A

[2:14] third merger preceded it months earlier. Street wrote publicly that consolidation is what happens when a category runs out of architectural headroom. that merging two portals does not change the portal model that adding AI to storage architecture is not transformation. It is acceleration of the same design. Today we go deep on category life cycles, execution gaps, revenue causation and what modern GTM must architect differently in an AI native world. Shrar, welcome to GTM Ball. Thank you so much for having me Rick. Glad to be here. You co-ounded Gainsite before customer success had language. How do you know when you are naming something structural versus just labeling a feature? So that goes back almost 15 years ago. So Gainset came to me as my just by way of introduction. I'm a serial entrepreneur. My first company that I co-ounded is a company called host analytics now renamed planful in the category of financial planning and financial consolidations and so on. And the second company was gainsite and now I co-ounded GTM buddy. The idea for gains came to be as hostics was scaling as we were acquiring customers and grow

[3:23] growing the business. We came to a point where every single quarter we add to the to the top line add new customers to the mix and also we had customers to renew and whenever there was a a customer cancellation commonly known as churn we have a leak we realize that we have a leaky bucket. So we started thinking about that was the context in 2008 2009 time frames that u my partner Jim Evelyn and I started thinking about okay this is a problem that's not unique to us any subscription based business is going going through the same challenges and there was no solution around at the point in time so almost a year's worth of ideation and iterations later we launched gains when we launched we were the world's first company that called ourselves as a customer success platform and so you you also made a great point in terms of um how do you know if you're creating a category or or we just naming it something different to that the problem that we were trying to solve for we knew that that's near universal there was no existing solution that was available in the market at that point in time but and also hey there was no function called customer success at this time so in 2011 we had a product that we launched and we called it customer

[4:31] success we're still trying to figure out who do we sell this thing to cuz there's no chief customer officer or a customer success function did not exist At most companies, do we sell this to the support function? Do we sell it to the services function? Do we sell to the CEO and all of that? Right? The early customers that we dealt with were customers who were really early to the to the movement in terms of trying to figure out that they need to be proactive about retaining customers and those were the people who saw our vision and got us uh into their their business and those were our early customers and one thing led to another raising of capital and growth happened much later. You watched customer success go from undefined to mandatory. At what point did you recognize enablement was following a similar life cycle arc? So the enablement was not exactly the same cycle that uh that customer success was in in the in the world of customer success. We are basically in an environment where there was no function called customer success but the business problem existed. People started realizing about the business problem.

[5:32] Now as that awareness started to grow the function came to be and once the function came in the people were getting hired into that function the tooling was required to support that function right when you talk about revenue activation the companies the the current status quo of the market is what you call revenue enablement and a precursor to that was content management systems and learning management systems that uh the the consolidation that that you're seeing right now. So this is a a more of a an evolution of an existing category into something dramatically different as opposed to a completely new category getting born but it's a new category that's that that's taking birth out of the existing category of enablement. You wrote that consolidation happens when categories run out of ideas. Is this an idea problem or an architecture problem? So it's an architectural problem. By architecture I just don't mean the technology architecture of of the products and companies but the architecture of the business model itself. If you look at the categories of with all due respect in our category the largest players were seismic highspot shop and bit can they really were instrumental to the birth of this categories they all started as content management systems and so on. Now that

[6:43] category and they all have raised millions hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. So if you just look at highspot and seismic in the heydays of 2021-22 both of them have raised capital they were both valued at about $3.5 billion each over $2 billion in terms of venture capital raised just between those two companies $2 billion in venture funding between two companies probably they are at about $600 million both the companies combined. Now any venture investor or an employee early employee or the founders of the company are looking for an exit and that exit is nowhere in sight given the market environment right now. Given the size of the companies it does not make sense to an IPO. So the companies do consolidate. This is a consolidation in the service of getting an exit as opposed to a consolidation to drive foster innovation. You're getting two reasonably sized companies together, making the company larger, making it IPO ready. That's the intent. Those are classic signs of category hitting its ceiling where the innovation is not the driver. You're not broadening the category. You're not getting into adjacent use cases, adjacent functions.

[7:48] You're just beefing up the size of the company. That's what I mean by hitting the ceiling. You are a 40 plus person company competing against platforms like 1,000 plus employees. Where does a small team win structurally not tactically? Yep. So this is a great question and uh the answer has changed dramatically in the past 2 years or 3 years now especially with with rapid adoption of AI. So just to give our own company's example last year we grew 3x the company grew 3x but our headcount remained flat. We're about 44 people at the beginning of the year and we grew 3x the business grew 3x and the headcount remained the same. So the nonlinearity of growth is possible today for AI native businesses. So when I say AI native I'm not just talking about at GTM we're building this cool AI product but it's in the DNA of the company. How do you run your business and how do you become a AI native company across the functions. It's not just about building the AI product but how do I run my friends? What's the role of AI in that? How do I I run marketing? What's the role of AI

[8:54] in that? How do I run engineering and product and customer success across the board? This AI capabilities, the moment you start rewiring your DNA, the company's DNA, it is possible to achieve explosive growth without a commensurate growth in headcount. And there are examples that are companies that have been even more successful than we are. We know of companies that are 10 people and have reached like $10 million, $20 million and raised hundreds of million dollars of capital. So we are not an exception but this is the new norm going forward. Being large in fact works against you because the change management for all of us humans including myself change management is really hard. If you have more people that need to change and adopt new ways of working that's that much more harder. So the young nimler companies are at a unnatural advantage in this era. You said the high spot and seismic merger does not fix the architecture.

[9:50] What is the underlying architectural flaw? They are merging together. Yeah. If you look at the category uh Rick, so the category highspot and seismic were both born as content management systems which are aimed for the GTM teams or the sales teams predominantly. Sales people need content, marketing produces content. You would create a repository of sorts, some form of a shareepoint portal or a purpose-built Google drive for the sales team. Make it easier for search and discovery so that reps are not hunting for information. They're able to find the content more easily. That was a foundational idea of these companies. And parallel to this, there was a learning management systems that evolved. LMS systems were there for for a long time. But people started realizing that learning for sales team is a slightly different beast. There's some specific nuances and specific capabilities that are needed. So there was sales focused sales readiness platforms that that emerged and in 2021 222 time frames as part of that consolidation wave that happened the earlier prior consolidation wave the learning systems and the content systems came together and that category was called revenue enablement and that's the category in which all of the companies that have that went through the consolidation the last 6 month uh were

[10:58] predominantly the CMS LMS providers and as a result of this consolidation if I look at uh highspot and seismic as an example Tasmic is a company that grew by acquisitions, probably five or six acquisitions their lifetime, probably more. And both of them have a strong CMS offering, content management system offering. So you have two companies, two CMSs that are coming together and it's one company now. If I'm a buyer in the market, I had a choice before. Do I go with seismic or do I go with highspot? Now okay now I have to do I choose like seismic and hope that the road map will keep moving or do I pick highspot and hope that that that product moves and it's the exact same shoes that you see in ShopAD and big cap. So this is a category problem but if you look at the functional problem zooming out a little functionally from a business perspective people are struggling with okay the value of enablement has been a challenge. This is something that uh that's been talked about in the past 3 four years a lot. A number of enablement professionals who talk about uh the the job losses that that that the profession has seen

[12:04] primarily because the function is seen as good to have. Nobody denies the need that okay I am hiring people. I need to train them. No leadership denies that. But when the push comes to the show in when the zero interest policy is is over money is tight you always start cutting what's good to have and enablement was always equated with a good to have function good to have because yeah training yes there's a correlation between that and eventual success of an app the need of the word is about how do you prove that the the the enablement efforts that people are um put um investing in is moving the needle on the revenue How are you, how is it activating the revenue outcomes? That's where we are focused on. That's where we see the the category evolving into enablement is not the focus area, but activating that revenue potential.

[12:53] Activating the potential of people, that's where the key focus is shifting. Yeah, that's that's a great point. Right. In small and medium-sized companies, you generally don't have the resources to allocate toward an enablement function. So you have marketing responsible for building out the assets and half the time like there's a coordination problem with sales because they don't know what assets they even if they do know all the different reps or the the AEES need different assets based on their patch and their list. So because it has an indirect effect on sales effectiveness, it often times gets overlooked. Yeah. In the the era of revenue activation, we are moving well past that of finding assets, right? So with enablement with a content system, reps wanted this wanted they wanted to find a pitch tag. They wanted to find a case study and they would go search for it and how do I find that asset? That was the problem statement. In the era of revenue activation, that's not where the problem statement starts. I as a rep am getting on a discovery call with a midsized manufacturing company in the Midwest region. Now given that context,

[14:03] what is that information that I should know? I'm getting on a call with an IT person trying to sell my solution, director of IT. Now, can I leverage AI to deliver? Okay, you're getting on a call with this persona and this persona in this industry has these are the typical problem statements, the pain points. Can you talk to that pain? Can you share evidence of how you solve that pain? Establish that those pains resonate with them. And once it is established, can you talk about how you solve for that pain? Now, if I a rep, how do I even do that? It's a lot of work. Yep. With a lot of work, I can go search, prepare for these meetings and all of that. What if what if the AI is in a position to read the details of the person that you are meeting with, find out what the account is about? What's the size of that account? Which segment does it belong in? Based on the person's title, can I enrich what I know about the person? Can I identify what are the likely pain points that you would want to validate up front that's the world of activation now once you have validated that you're also looking at I use medpek as my qualification methodology as part of your discovery call these are the

[15:09] questions that you want to find out surfacing that continual re uh reinforcement and helping the rep when they're executing on revenue that's the world of revenue activation in that world don't get me wrong we still have the content we still have the the learning that's necessary Sorry the learning also includes the role plays AI role plays and all of that right but that those are means to an end activation in the moment of need where the rep lives that's where the bug is headed right yeah that's a it's huge bottleneck you're solving right because at the point you can dynamically personalize the the proposal or the deck that you're sending based on the account and the contacts and uh what tier might be most applicable to them based on their revenue, their position in the market, you resolve a huge bottleneck which allows the team to now streamline the process of creating decks personalized for each account. And so I don't know, maybe saving 10 hours a week per per uh team or per rep like y there's yeah

[16:18] saving uh time is one part of it. It's an important part of it because you're giving back time to the rep so that they have more selling time, right? In addition to that, we don't stop at that. What are the processes that we hope to be we are able to do but it's not happening today in the service of driving that revenue. Let me give an example. So just now just before this call, I'm giving a real life example. I have a call at 2 p.m. Right after this call, I have I'm getting onto your sales call. Me and my partner, my head of sales, it was it's it's a strategic account for us and preparing for the call. And as part of that call, the prospect has already told us that okay, we want to do a proof of concept of sorts. Okay. And when they said proof of concept, we wanted to create a very personalized plan in terms of, you know, any P which is not bounded. It becomes an open-ended proof of concept. I I might say that okay, I have set up my instance of GTMbody and you go play with it and then tell me it's all is a go or not. What we are shooting for is an alignment in terms of okay, it's a proof of concept. Yes, we're willing to do because you're a large customer, potentially a large deal, but you want to establish guardrails. The guard rails are okay, here is what we will do and

[17:24] here is what you expect to achieve during the proof of concept period of let's say 30 days and here is what the success looks like, right? We need to create a an action plan for the PC. This is this is the setup of the problem statement. Now, with GTMu, all that we did was we went into GTMu's instance. We looked at all the prior interactions with the prospect and asked GTM we call it nucleus the product that uh that we are launching it's not at GA we are drinking our own champagne right now we asked in terms of okay this is a P plan and help us put together a P and it the system was able to generate the entire plan for the P that in in about 30 minutes from now we're going to be presenting that plan to the uh to the prospect they might want to tweak it Let's trick it sum we got 90% there. Now this is something it's not just about productivity it's about proving that we have listened to them in terms of what are their pain points that they have articulated we needed to make sure that that's captured in the PC and we we established the mutual acceptance criteria what's the success criteria like for the PC all of that articulated

[18:32] in the matter of minutes prior to leveraging an AI tool like GTMbody that would have taken hours or would every rep be able to pos create such a document that's anybody's guess some of the smarter ones just they were they could but every rep what is the difference between revenue visibility and revenue causation and why is an entire category been comfortable selling one without proving the other so not uh how do you define revenue visibility I I can talk about the causation I just want to make sure that we both are using the same definition of revenue visibility what's your definition of revenue visibility so as CEO of the company for me what's revenue visibility I I just went through my board board conversations operating plan for the year and I I have forecast for the business that I I share with the board. Then on a quarterly basis we have revenue forecast that we deliver and we review the the the current pipeline reviews and forecast reviews once a week and what is the visibility that I have as as as a leader of the company in terms of okay where do we stand with our targets that to me is a visibility problem. Now that visibility has always been challenging because a lot of times it's subjective. You are dependent a lot of times on rep's intuition their

[19:45] judgment call. I think this deal is going to close based on the conversation that I've had but there's no objective evidence to that. So this is has been an eternal problem you know the forecast improving the forecast accuracies understanding where you exactly stand in the the pipeline and the third aspect of it one is visibility where do we stand and how accurate is it is the second uh layer of that and three how can I move the needle on converting better hitting the number that's where the activation comes in now this sec two layers in terms of the the visibility of where we stand datadriven basis that's where tools like GTMbody come into play I'm not claiming that it's only GTM that does it. You could do it manually, you know, could download all the deal data and you could set up your cloud project or uh do do whatever the manual approaches to doing that. But with tools like GTM, you understand in terms of where do you stand if you use a med pick or band or spin whatever your methodology is, you you would know exactly in terms of where do you stand on the D and that is automated for you.

[20:44] Yeah, that's huge. I mean, even just the idea of recording manually each one of the calls and then uploading them and having like the uh AI on the back end like scan through the the captions of the transcription of the meeting that's going to take even half 30 minutes just to manually do that single component. So, yep. Yep. I mean, it's huge because So, you nailed it. You nailed it. Right. So we're getting into in the world of AI you know the tools that everybody has access to tools it's not a tool problem AI tools and AI tools are evolving that's a how do you keep pace with change is a a different problem so but the manual hops that one needs to go how many people are motivated to do that how long does it take is becoming a bigger problem that's where tech and the architectural constructs that you have come into play how many integrations does your platform have how many are out of the box what's the MCP strategy of the company everybody checks a box saying that in today's world every software vendor will tell you that we have an MCP but what can you truly do with the MCP a well architected MCP can really eliminate all

[21:55] of that work of you know downloading the transcripts getting the CRM data getting your content engagement data all of that the MCP does it for you by exposing a unified interface GTM MCP is architected that way so I don't need to do any of that manual work I can have a predefined skill that is is architected uh that skill I could yeah I could go and do it in cloud but you'll need to do just the way you described I will need to download my stuff and and put it there every Yep. Yep. And that's just for one component, right, of your your like if you look at what GTM buddy is doing. There are several other features outside outside of just the surfacing the insight that comes and and matching that with say a spreadsheet you have the back end with what solutions fit what problems.

[22:42] Doubling double clicking on what you just said and connecting it back to the example. The example was that this call that's coming up in 25 minutes from now, we have a PC plan that we need to present to to the prospect and get their sign off, right? We created the PC plan. How do I share it with a with a prospect? That's where our digital sales room comes into play. There's already a micro site that we had set up for this prospect. This page is getting published there which they can review and update. So, you're getting connecting all the dots in terms of what happens in the revenue workflow is critically important. If I were to have 10point solutions for every single thing, then I'm doing that hops. Do this here then come here then go there. Right. And so have you guys already evolved into a companywide solution? Absolutely. We typically the pattern that we see starts off with sales team.

[23:32] The logical uh expansions that we see is getting into all of GTM teams expands into the sales development teams, SDR teams, e- sales and post sales functions, f services and customer success in particular and increasingly we're seeing the channel mo motions for channel partner enablement. So we see the all of the GTM teams at a company adopting our solution. Great. And if you were designing revenue activation from zero today, no legacy stack, no inherited process, what would you build first? I would really double down on meeting the rep where they are at. The context is everything in today's world. I can get the information to support the serving the the the rep with the information. That's a secondary problem in there. There's no problem of you know creation of content is cheap these days. It's about the context engineering part of it in terms of the context of revenue. If I have a CSM getting on a difficult call with with a customer of mine who might be churning now how do I that that's the context we want the systems to understand and provide the right guidance in the service of

[24:38] supporting that context and further my business objectives context engineering that goes around that that that's where my focus would be that's where I'll start. If AI injects signal directly into workflow, what happens to the middle layers built around oversight and management? So AI is injecting signals. I'll talk about the current state. Not talk talking about let's say what's going to happen 3, five, 10 years from now. At this point in time, we have human in the loop. That's what we we strongly believe in. Especially you're talking about large transactions with customers or prospects. We do want to equip the human with 95% of the work. But a human oversight is something that we strongly recommend especially when it is customerf facing. So it is assistive to the human not replacing the human.

[25:24] That's if that's what you are asking. Yes. Yes. Does AI make sellers more strategic or compress the role into pure execution. I think it can make sellers far more strategic if the rep is ready for it. So this this almost the the situation. I think we were talking about it the other day. Everybody has says that I use AI. Everybody has a chat GPT license or a cloud license or a Gemini license and everybody is using that as a replacement to a Google search maybe for improving their email copies or social posts and stuff like that. That's something that most of us do but it the reps who are strategic about it in terms of investing cycles to learn the possibilities learn the art of possible with AI they are getting far more strategic in terms of their usage of AI. So and they're spending less time in terms of the the grunt work. If I were to talk about creation of that PC plan, I I'm using that just as an example. If if I'm a strategic rep, I would think about how do I want to structure the PC. I would have spent hours of time to craft that plan. But if I'm not not strategic enough, then I would say okay, sign up for P and good to go. Get something in place, paperwork in place and start the P. That's what an average rep would do. A strategic uh rep would have invested

[26:35] time to create that. Now a strategic rep with the right knowledge of AI can leverage AI to get to that earn more faster. It makes them even more strategic and productive. Where does AI meaningfully close the execution c gap and where does it create more surface level noise? So the surface level noise I answer the second thing first. My perspective the world is not short of bells and whistles. Let's be honest there's so many AI tools that are coming out every single day. you you you come across five new tools that that have come out in the market. Now adding all of this into the workflow is that going to work or you going to deal with explode from you already you're dealing with 10 to 15 tools that that reps are using or you going to add another 10 and how many of these tools or deeper in the world of startups you would know uh this very well there are solutions which are AI wrappers I create a a thin UI layer on top of a chat GPT or a cloud and I would call this a solution. So those are areas where I would say that these are distraction. Any solution that is well crafted in today's world in the world of AI. My view is that either you are

[27:42] building those frontier models like the open AIS and the Google's and uh whatnot or you're building out well-crafted applications that re-envvisage recraft the workflows for the AI era. They're not point solutions. They're transforming the workflows all together end to end. You build GTM buddy on the belief that capacity already exists inside most teams. What unlocks it and what keeps it buried? Great question. So when we think about capacity, so we we talk about in my world uh in a leadership role typically I would say okay u at this point in time should I hire more people? Yes. No. That could be a rep that I need to hire or could be a pre-sales engineer that I need to hire or a CSM across all functions. Right? So there are thumb rules that companies follow in terms of okay an app has 15 or 20 activities at a given point in time. It's time to add a new app. A thumb rule might vary from person to person based on their philosophy, size of days and so on. Right now uh that why does that thumb rule came to be? It is a function of recognition that as a human being I can

[28:50] only do so much work in the in the 8 hours a day. Even if I was stretching a little bit I cannot do too much more than that. That's a recognition of that capacity constraint. But when I am leveraging AI and leveraging it effectively, I'm freeing up a lot of my time and I'm also getting faster outcomes. So there are two things that are happening. Time savings and by doing the right things and delighting my prospects, I'm able to do more and shorten the deal cycle. When I'm shortening the deal cycle, that creates its own capacity. Instead of waiting for 3 months to close a deal or 90 days, I'm able to close a deal on an average in 60 days. that adds to my capacity. Instead of uh spending 40 hours on a particular deal, AI is able to help me do all of those activities and more. In 30 hours, I'm unlocking capacity. So, you're getting to a world there's a virtual circle of people who can leverage AI strategically or unlocking capacity on both ends. That's what we mean by unlocking capacity. So, you know, you wrote that in the eentic area 18 months of frozen road map. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Uh yeah. So uh from there I I as a person who's been in the industry over 25 years I've seen

[30:01] multiple different changes the paradigm shifts if you will seen the rise of social media compared to 2000 what it is today the rise of the mobile phone and seen the birth of a category and a function with customer success and all of that but these were all major changes back in the day each change was very significant change in its own right they continue to be but the change that we are seeing now is nothing like that I have ever seen in my professional career of over 25 years. Nothing even comes close to it. And in this era a few months we get outdated. Classic examples if you would have noticed that anthropic has suddenly become a darling of the industry. A lot of people saying that okay you must shift to claude versus HRGPT. That moment is probably a few months old. At the heart of it there are couple of things co-work cloud release of cloud co-work and release of cloud skills. Those were at the heart of it. And how old are they? Clot skills was launched end of October and it was open sourced as a standard in December. That's all of two two and a half months ago. And there are close to a million skills that are that the the community has created already. And if you're a large company with a change management

[31:11] burden that I need to deal with, how can I even get that into my road map? How many hops do I need to go through? It's not possible, is it? So it's not like people are not smart. They know it. But in a ocean liner with a thousand people, how are you even going to get an alignment in the in the where each person is on a different plane of learning not everybody is as active in terms of learning. In a company like mine, I am learning every single day. I keep an eye in terms of what's happening and that's true for everyone on my team. We're staying nimble and uh by choice and we are able to to react quickly and build proactively for the future and a future that's unfolding now. not living in a road map that was created at the beginning of the year and okay I I check the boxes if I have delivered on that road map no that agility is of paramount importance for survival it's not just for success but for survival times they really have changed yep truly I'd like to move on now to the rapid fire section of the pod now in one sentence first instinct enablement is dead true or false enablement as it is known now is dead

[32:18] the most dangerous move a founder makes after product market fit assuming that I have reached product market fit for good and uh just focus on the GTM and other angle you asked for one line I'll add one more line to it given the changes that are happening around us the product market fit is a continuous game it's like a treadmill I think you said that also in your one of your blog posts yeah it's a continuous process right there the goalposts just are always uh are always expanding so got to keep pushing the metric everyone tracks acts that measures the wrong thing. Okay, I just talk about something recent in my mind in in a conversation with uh over 50 leadership GTM leaders. A common consensus emerging that we are all proactive about AI because we have given chat GPT and cloud licenses to all of our team and they are helping us transform lead the AI transformation. It's not truly a metric but that is dangerous for me and I I believe every one of us individually professionally and as businesses we are in a transformation era right now. Just assuming that just giving tools to these LLM tools and saying that the

[33:26] transformation is happening is the biggest mech that's happening right now it's going to prove costly. That's a good point. when fragmented architecture when you get tools tacked on instead of having a foundational architecture that can lead to collapse. The belief about AI and sales that is completely wrong. So I talk about uh the category that I operate in uh namely enablement and revenue activation still see that a number of uh organizations and professionals continue to focus on activity metrics like learning metrics. How many people took this course? How many attended? how many completed a course and uh what's the passing percentage and what's the average score and all of that that excessive focus in the revenue organizations especially in the enablement side that seems to be continuing it's decreasing but that focus is still there the next revenue category to consolidate boy with its consolidation across the board seeing that um you know we just saw it's more of a vertical consolidation enablement but you're seeing gong getting into forecasting it's getting into outreach sales engagement outreach getting into forecasting and it's getting into call recording. Everybody is trying to become

[34:36] everything everybody else. So it's going to be interesting. I believe the consolidation has already started. The consolidation of adjacent categories merging into one to provide a holistic solution is be far more supportive of that compared to vertical consolidations where with two competing vendors merging together to become a larger company. AI layered onto port architecture innovation or denial. It's a denial. You need a fundamental rethink on AI, the context engineering part of it that we talked about earlier. You helped name customer success before the market had language for it. You are naming revenue activation. Now, if there's one structural shift modern GTM leaders must make immediately, what is it? That's a great question. It's truly as a leader thinking about how AI is transforming my GTM. That's one mindset shift that I would strongly recommend the GTM leaders to think deeply about.

[35:30] Not just listen to others but think deeply about. Yeah. Just saying that this shift is so foundational and fundamental at many levels that a lot of people who are in the leadership uh positions now and end their way through that we all are going through this transformation. Probably people do not appreciate the importance of rolling up the sleeves and learning what's going on. Hands on. Two mergers, four months. Bigger platforms do not mean better architecture. Revenue compounds only when structural layers are engineered in sequence. Enablement stores knowledge. Activation collapses distance between signal and decision. If you are building GTM under real constraints, explore GTM vault. Build architecture not activity. Shredar, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank you. The GTM operating system for teams building repeatable revenue.