The GTMnow Podcast

Justin Strackany is an early stage software vet, investor, GTM executive, and worked as the first employee at SecureLink for a total of 18 years. Throughout his career at SecureLink, Justin played a multitude of different roles including Director of CSM, VP of Sales, and most recently as their Chief Customer Officer. Justin shares an impactful story at SecureLink that led his CEO to bring him in as an acquisition partner. Discussing the journey of an acquisition through a private equity firm and the pivotal decision of rolling his shares post acquisition. What You Will Learn:Knowing your values when joining a company.The benefits of startup learnings and acquisitions.How to manage and level up in the private equity and venture capital space.The importance of relinquishing control as a leader.How to work within an executive team.How to manage up to a board & private equity firm.Highlights:(3:05) Hot take on Bitcoin’s trajectory.(8:33) Building and starting out SecureLink as an Acquisition Partner.(16:12) Knowing what your equity equates to when joining a company.(19:05) What Justin implemented on the Go-to-Market front after being brought on.(21:20) Blind spots encountered post acquisition.(29:47) What Justin did to triple sales post acquisition.(32:10) Things to do to set yourself up for a CRO role.(35:57) Actionable ways to improve revenue retention.Guest Speaker Links:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinstrackany/GTM Consulting: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmdotconsulting/Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Ben Dietz, general manager of Mintel, discusses the challenges they faced during the pandemic and how to lead in a crisis. He emphasizes the importance of trust, support, and feedback in motivating a team. They also explore the concept of leadership and highlight influential figures in the guest's life.

Max Altschuler and Scott Barker back at it for yet another monthly jam session!Touching base on the latest internal and external updates, our official GTM retreat announcement, newest deals, the secret sauce in throwing executive level events, & Max's hot tips on his 36th birthday and everything he's been working on in regards to personal and career development.Highlights:(1:33) Annual GTM retreat details.(2:10) GTM Job Board updates.(3:33) How to host a white-glove experience event for executives?(5:40) Building and fostering a deeply authentic community (through our annual retreat).(7:20) The value and takeaways from our GTM sessions - how we look at businesses, how we size up opportunities, etc.(16:48) Max's 36th Birthday fueled with reflection, recalibration, self growth.Guest Speaker Link:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/ Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Tyler Short joins us this week as we dive into all things Go-To-Market, but this time with a Venture spin on things. We get a deeper glimpse into what's going on across the VC world and the implications of today's market for founders & investors. Tyler currently works as the General Counsel and Director of Operations at SixThirty Ventures.Tyler peels the onion on one of his biggest career learnings to date - a venture deal that crumbled apart. Not one to miss!What You Will Learn:Things to look out for as someone investing in startups today.How to fundraise smarter.The fundamentals to help you better navigate which startups to invest in.Legal necessities to be aware of as a founder.Knowing when to walk away from a deal.Highlights:(3:26) VC terminology & how to break into venture.(6:28) Predictions and themes in today's Market.(14:15) A deal that fell apart and what Tyler learned throughout the process.(30:36) Best advice to founders struggling to raise in this market.(33:27) Advice to founders around legal work.(35:42) Tyler’s view on AI legal tech.(38:15) What the best founders do to move the needle.Guest Speaker Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-short-gc/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TylerShortVC Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Erica Kuhl joins us this week for an inspiring episode on how to build your community in today's environment, with over 20 years of enterprise community expertise. Erica shares some valuable tips and tricks that she learned after spending over a decade successfully building the Trailblazer community and ecosystem at Salesforce. What You Will Learn:How she built the Trailblazer Salesforce community from scratch and what inspired her to do it.How to run programs with any size budget and any size team.How to build community strategies to scale.The positive outcomes of exceptional leadership.The importance of aligning community to a business strategy.Highlights:(2:30) Intro & Erica's experience building out trailblazers at Salesforce.(10:55) Hot take: The over saturation of community.(18:25) Challenges scaling the community at Salesforce.(35:24) What Erica would do differently if she could go back and build Salesforce's Community all over again?(42:58) Erica's advice on how to make team meetings more upbeat, lively, and productive.(45:20) Erica's take on a widely held belief that revenue leaders share that she thinks might be bullsh*t.(47:23) Step 1 when starting a community.Guest Speaker Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericakuhl/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericakuhlBlog: https://medium.com/@erica.kuhlWebsite: https://www.ericakuhl.comHost Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Dave Kennett joins us on this week's episode to discuss lessons learned throughout his years transforming businesses to adapt for a digital world, the art form of sales, how to lead from the front, and walks us through the genesis and evolution of Replayz.In 2019, after an extensive career at notable companies such as AutoTrader.ca, Strutta, Payfirma, Hootesuite, and MergeBase, Dave founded Replayz - a predictive SaaS platform that uses Data Science to analyze Call Scoring Results to predict what skills matter the most.What You Will Learn:The importance of role-playing, how to communicate to the CFO.Steps to building trust and rapport through credibility.How to cultivate and leverage customer stories for a competitive advantage.5 leadership tools to arm your team with.Ways to visibility improve your win rate.How to lead from the front, and learn the most from past mistakes.Strategies to navigate career path options in the current environment .Highlights:(5:20) Call coaching culture & Replayz pain point solution strategy.(7:45) Blind spots in discovery/demos & how to avoid them.(13:22) Common threads of sales reps that consistently crush it.(18:10) How to introduce a customer story?(21:45) The importance of role-playing.(25:00) Digitally transforming AutoTrader to Trader.ca.(27:10) Leadership lessons from experience.(34:25) How to think about career pathing.(39:10) Rounding out your leadership skills.(40:25) Widely held beliefs that are wrong.(44:30) Actionable moves available now.Guest Speaker Link:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkennett/ Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

‘Thinking more out of the box instead of just following playbooks is something that I think is important.’ - Martin Gontovnikas. In this week’s episode, Scott Barker chats with Martin Gontovnikas ‘Gonto’ about taking big risks in marketing, Generative AI, and understanding customer behavior while making marketing strategies.Gonto is the founder of Hyper Growth Partners. He previously worked with Off Zero where he started in branding relations and ended up in marketing and growth, growing with the company in revenue from 20 dollars to 20 million average revenue.What You Will Learn:The impact of Generative AI on marketing.How to achieve big hairy audacious goals in marketing. Experimenting in marketing when risk tolerance is low.Highlights:(04:02) Generative AI for marketing.(09:56) Where will Generative AI be in 10 years?(13:31) Audacious goal experiments that worked.(22:53) Big audacious goals that turned out successful.(30:29) Restructuring back after implementing an audacious idea.(33:40) Running experiments when risk tolerance is low.(36:40) How long do you run an experiment before making a decision?(39:31) What most revenue leaders believe but Gonto doesn’t agree with.(44:01) Fitting marketing strategies into users’ habits.(46:36) How to get in touch with Gonto?Guest Speaker Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgonto/enWebsite: https://www.hypergrowthpartners.com/ Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Episode SummaryThere are many benefits of the marketing and sales teams working together. It helps generate better leads, improve conversion rates, and eventually, increase company revenue. But how do you align marketing and sales strategy? In this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, our host Sam Jacobs welcomes Mariana Cogan, the CMO of People.ai. They talk about why buying needs to be a team sport, why forecasting won't lead to the growth you need, and the importance of diversity in technology.Guest-at-a-Glance💡 Name: Mariana Cogan💡 What she does: She's the CMO of People.ai.💡 Company: People.ai💡 Noteworthy: Mariana is known for building strong alignment with sales. She's also a committed advocate of diversity inclusion and founded the Hispanic ERG resulting in building the best teams and bringing different lenses to the C-suite.💡 Where to find Mariana: LinkedInThe GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Max Altschuler and Scott Barker back at it for another monthly jam session. Sharing some compelling internal company updates as well as the impact of our candidate placements in the last year (placing over 80 candidates in the last year). We also can't help but discuss some topical stuff, including: Whether companies should begin to ban alcohol at work related events, generational trends, and ChatGPT's takeover on our creativity. Highlights:(1:50) The generational evolution within the work force.(4:45) The importance of our creativity and whether ChatGPT has much competition against it.(13:17) Hot take on whether companies should ban alcohol or not.(16:20) Internal company updates & the motivation behind our decisions [new HQ office, new official GTMfund hires].(27:00)  Deal updates & SPVs.(29:42) Angel Investing sessions and candidate placements at our portfolio companies.Guest Speaker Link:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler/ Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/The GTMnow Podcast The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Mark Stephenson, with 30 years of solution sales leadership experience, discusses the 5 leading and 4 lagging indicators of a strong go-to-market team. Topics include go-to-market approach, hiring great talent, cross-functional alignment, and leading and lagging metrics for successful alignment.