GTM 138: The AI Advantage, Solving Sales & Marketing Alignment for Better GTM Execution with Jaleh Rezaei
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Jaleh Rezaei is the CEO & Co-founder of Mutiny, a company reimagining the B2B buying experience by transforming transactional relationships into meaningful connections through AI-powered personalization. Mutiny helps enterprises restore the human element in modern buying at scale, and is used by some of the fastest growing companies in the world including Amplitude, Snowflake and Qualtrics. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and CMOs of companies such as Uber, Condé Nast and Salesforce. Prior to Mutiny, Jaleh was the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Gusto, where she grew the company from 500 to 50,000 customers over 4 years. She was the Director of Product Marketing at VMware prior to Gusto.
Discussed in this Episode:
AI-powered personalization is reshaping B2B sales and marketing
AI-driven lead scoring improves quality and targets high-value prospects
AI anticipates and overcomes sales objections in real time
Sales & marketing alignment: why it matters and how to achieve it
The risks of AI-driven outbound and how to avoid common pitfalls
Scaling 1:1 experiences efficiently with AI
AI-powered buyer interactions and their impact on GTM strategies
If you missed GTM 137, check it out here: The Biggest Business Turnaround You’ve Never Heard Of & The Growth Levers to Pull When Things Go Wrong
Highlights:
03:27 – Why AI innovation is game-changing for founders building and scaling companies.
06:49 – How 1:1 sales personalization drives 14x higher conversion rates.
10:45 – AI-powered hyper-personalization is reshaping enterprise sales.
16:30 – The biggest AI mistakes in sales and marketing.
20:55 – Scaling white-glove experiences across all target accounts.
24:45 – Why CRM data is a mess and how AI finally fixes it.
28:14 – A masterclass in sales & marketing alignment.
31:20 – The real reason sales and marketing clash (and how to fix it).
42:10 – The most valuable AI use cases for B2B sales teams.
47:30 – How AI is changing B2B buyer behavior and what sellers must do.
Guest Speaker Links (Jaleh Rezaei):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalehr/
Mutiny: https://www.mutinyhq.com/
The State of Sales & Marketing Alignment Report: https://www.mutinyhq.com/report
Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/
Find GTMnow (GTMfund’s Media Brand):
GTM 138 Episode Transcript
Jaleh Rezaei: I think there’s never been a more exciting time to be building. what you can do with LLMs is absolutely remarkable.
It’s just absolutely incredible the scope of impact that founders can now have for their customers.
How do we get back to the first principles of revenue, which is that relationships close deals, and really use this technology to build a better relationship focused, one to one experience for the buyer.
Scott Barker: I think all this technology is going to just allow us to be more human
Jaleh Rezaei: The more deep personalization you put in front of sellers, the more excited they get, cause that’s what they’ve wanted from marketing their whole lives.
You can now use AI to make those things really fun and magical and fast.
Sales and marketing have fought like cats and dogs, but actually with this new technology, there is now a path to solving some of these things.
Scott Barker: Hello, and welcome back to the GTM podcast. Super excited to have you with us and always excited for my next guest. And we’re just talking before this, it has been far too long since we caught up, uh, not over email. Uh, so this is a fun chance to hang out with my good friend, Jaleh. Uh, Jaleh, welcome to the podcast.
Jaleh Rezaei: Thank you.
Scott Barker: I’m pumped to have you and super quickly just for the listeners. I’d like to do a quick, quick bio before we get into it. Jaleh Rezaei, is the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, a company that we’re super excited to back at GTM funds. And they’re really re-imagining the B2B buying experience.
By transforming transactional relationships into meaningful connections through AI powered personalization, obviously everyone’s thinking about AI right now. So we will be diving into that a little bit later in the episode. but really meet me helps enterprises restore the human element in modern buying at scale and is used by.
Some incredible fast growing companies, uh, including amplitude, snowflake, Qualtrics, we all know and love these great SAS companies. And, uh, we’re excited to be investors, but also backed by Sequoia tiger global and CMOs of companies such as. Uber or Salesforce. so got a lot of people around the table and it’s been so incredible to see your journey.
And then prior to starting Mutiny, Jaleh was the head of marketing and business development at Gusto, uh, another fantastic company. Grew that company from 500 to 50,000 customers over four years. So heck of a run there. Uh, and then. Uh, before that was the director of product marketing at VMware.
A lot of great companies and, uh, building the next great company here. But Jaleh, how’s, how’s it been? I think a lot of founders right now are, uh, both excited about the future. And also like, wow, there is a lot to keep up with in terms of innovation that’s happening on specifically the AI front.
Jaleh Rezaei: Totally agree. I mean, I think there’s never been a more exciting time to be building. What you can do with LLMs is absolutely remarkable. And for me, the biggest impact has been the scope of the problem that we can solve for customers. You know, when we started Mutiny a few years ago, We had to think in a much more focused way about the product, and the workflows now, um, with LLMs, we have the ability to say, okay, not just, you know, what are people would have traditionally done inside of software, but now let’s take all of the workflows that were done outside of the software, historically, maybe they had to collaborate with the sales team. They had to go get information from eight different sources. Um, they had to call on somebody else on the team to write the content for that. They had to go get somebody else to synthesize all the analytics. All of those workflows can now be brought into the product using AI.
Um, and I think it’s just absolutely incredible. The scope of impact that founders can now have. For their customers.
Scott Barker: Yeah. It’s been really incredible to see these different, different waves. I guess, you know, taking a step back, when you first started Mutiny, like, do you, did you think that we were going to be here and these capabilities that we were going to have, you know, through generative AI and now agentic AI, did you see that writing on the wall or has it been kind of adapting, iterating, moving quickly, testing, to kind of stay ahead of the curve?
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think that we saw a I accelerating the way that it has. But we certainly always planned and did use AI in the product, but we’ve just been. Really pleasantly surprised by, um, by the capabilities and how much we can do for the customers. So, I mean, you know, some of my backstory, right?
And so I started to go-to-market at VMware.And the thing that was exciting for me in retrospect is that. I got to work right away with the enterprise sales team. And in that process, I wasn’t caught up in the technology and what’s possible, what’s not possible. I just got to work on these deals.
And I really got to understand go-to-market. And the first principles of it, right, which was for us, okay, let’s get to know every customer. We would dive into their press releases, their earnings announcements, we would talk with the sales team. What did we know about them? What were their priorities?
How could we help them? And then we would translate that into one to one customized decks, ROI reports, and, you know, all sorts of things. And I got to see very early on what great looks like, like, how do you build a relationship with the customer? What does a buying experience look like? That’s absolutely awesome for the end user and got to see in their eyes how excited they were about partnering with us, how much they trusted us, we were an unlock for their business.
After that, I went to Gusto and obviously significantly smaller deal sizes, and that’s when I really got to learn how much you have to trade relationships for scale, and reach. and that was a tough trade to make because It is a lot less effective in terms of conversion rates, right?
Like the one to one stuff we see converts at 14 X higher because it’s just so much more relevant to the buyer. whereas the scaled stuff, you know, it, it tanks your conversion rates, but Hey, you can reach more people. And I think as a CMO. people, understand that, right? They’re like, I can either do the one to one relationship stuff that buyers love, that the sales team understands and brings everybody together, or I can reach a lot of people.
And most of us have to do that scaled high throughput, process in go-to-market. Um, and so I ultimately left, to solve that problem. I felt like technology could help. I felt like AI could help, and, and make it easier so that you could have both of those worlds. Um, now of course, fast forward to today’s world, you know, I would say like our first adoption of AI has made that problem and that need even more urgent than, than before.
Um, which I can go on and on about like how we’re misusing AI and how we need to kind of get back to those first principles.
Scott Barker: Just want to highlight something you said there. So when you create one to one personalized content and collateral in a deal cycle, you found that deals close to 14X.
Jaleh Rezaei: I mean, we have seen the I’d say it starts with the engagement rate, right? So, the engagement that you see with the page and the content is about 14X higher. This is from our customers’ case studies that we have published. I was just looking at a more recent customer who increased their pipeline by over 10X by using one to one to get inside of the enterprise accounts with whom they had a relationship, but they were trying to expand those accounts.
So they created one to one experiences for them that highlighted the relationship. and they then, you know, distributed, uh, those experiences to them by other sales teams, via ads, why other websites by actually QR codes as well. And they were able to have an absolutely enormous impact on the pipeline.
And I think it all goes back to the fact that when you speak really directly to what a. companies trying to do and you connect your product to that, right? So we’re not talking about fake personalization where you just insert their company name, but rather you speak to their priorities and how you help, uh, address and unlock those priorities.
That’s when you start to see really, really amazing results, , from a pipeline standpoint, the problem has always been that it’s not scalable. Um, and that’s. That’s what we’re building at Mutiny and the latest release that we had last week uses AI in almost every step of that process to make it significantly faster.
Scott Barker: So I’m going to go ahead. And usually on the podcast, we don’t talk a ton about, product. We talk through like stories and best practices, but you know, I get hit up all the time about AI use cases and you’re on the front lines of this. And I think people are really looking for. Companies with a strong point of view on how to leverage AI.
They want real world use cases. and was super impressed with the release that, uh, you had last week. So would, would love to just break it down. How are you using AI? Talk to me about this new release and some of the results that your customers are seeing.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, totally. So, I mean, we can even take a step back and talk a little bit about overall AI adoption and go-to-market. I think that the first wave of AI tooling has been. Very much about the efficiency of go-to-market teams and not enough about what does the buyer want and how do we actually better serve them and respecting that if we can give the buyers what they want, we see much better performance from a go-to-market standpoint.
I think this is common, right? With any new technology, the first wave always. Takes what we are doing and applies the technology in a much more limited way based on how we understand and operate in the world today. Like when mobile first came out, you know, it took a while for Uber and the Door Dashes to come out.
The first apps were ruler, calculator, right? Like just things that we were doing. Um, Uh, and not what the true potential of it was. Right. And so when I look at what we’ve done on the go-to-market side, and we’re all guilty of this, and, you know, we’ve all had to play around with the technology. So, you know, I don’t blame anybody, but, um, the result of it has been that we’ve basically focused on, okay, let’s take that scaled model that we talked about and let’s.
Let’s produce content faster. It’s been all about more, faster, more, faster. And the end result of that has been that it is. We’ve been showering our coveted buyers in spam, right? There’s so much more content out there and we’re starting to see the results, to show that it’s backfiring and it’s actually making things harder for go-to-market teams, right?
So for example, um, the latest report I saw was a 71 percent drop in overall outbound performance. That’s a channel where we’ve had tremendous AI adoption, right? Everybody, for some reason, looked at BDRs and said, we need to eliminate them with AI. and you know, it’s. It’s not that effective, right? I get so many calls on my phone from robo BDR, so many emails.
I basically just don’t even respond. So maybe in the past I would have responded. Now there’s the volume is just so insane. Um, we’re seeing like over 50 percent of buyers are saying that if they can tell emails are being AI generated for them, um, you know, in, in mass that they are less likely to recommend those brands.
So we’re seeing the impact on some of these. Fuzzier things that actually very much translate into revenue in the medium and long term. So I think our first adoption, was very much about making ourselves faster and taking the model that buyers didn’t want to begin with and accelerating it. I think the next frontier of AI, which is something that we are pioneering at Mutiny, is how we get back to it.
The buyer and focus on the first principles of revenue, which is that relationships close deals, , and really use this technology and all of the power that it has to build a better relationship focused one to one experience for the buyer. So, in the release that we just made, um, we basically, you know, looked at what is everything that’s hard about that process, right?
Well, you have to do a bunch of research on the company, right? You have to understand what their priorities are. Well, with AI agents, we can go look at all of their earnings reports, press releases, all of their web presences, and be able to synthesize that into the company’s priorities and how, you know, our customers can help them.
You have to go have a whole bunch of sales conversations to understand every single account. Who do, who have we had a call with, um, what did they say was important to them? You know, maybe we closed, lost the deal six months ago. What did they tell us? They want what we can’t do, et cetera. All of that sits somewhere in the CRM.
And it’s very difficult for marketers to access that and to go have all of those meetings. Right. We use AI to be able to pull that instantaneously into the messaging and the experience for every single account. Another step in that process is, okay, so now you know what their priorities are, how do you communicate to them what you can do to help with those priorities?
How do you bring the right resources? Like your company has written thousands of assets and things like that, right? How do you recommend the right ones to them? , We use AI to generate, uh, all of that stuff. Um, and it makes it so much easier. It actually makes it fun. Uh, writing is really challenging, right?
Um, and so we, you know, we, we make it really easy. They can just use AI to iterate on that and feel really good about what they’re putting in front of the customer. Um, the sales team loves it ’cause their chief complaint is always that marketing doesn’t know what sales talks to customers about. So we can bring all of that into the experience.
And then, you know, from an analytics standpoint. Understanding, passing all of that engagement data to the sales team and helping them understand why they’re being alerted to this particular customer. So we tell them who from the company has engaged, what they have looked at, and all of that information is just really crisply synthesized for them so that they can very quickly.
Either prep for the call, um, that came as a result of that, or if the customer engaged a lot, but maybe didn’t go all the way to booking a meeting for them to be able to then get in front of that customer in a highly personalized way, um, and, and help them take that next step if that’s what makes sense for them.
Scott Barker: I love it. Yeah. It sounds like, you know, back in the day we all had to tier our accounts. You know, you had your tier one accounts that were like the closest to your ICP. They drove the most revenue. They were the sickest. And those were the ones that we’re able to get this personalized one to one experience.
Then you had your tier two, tier three, where you increasingly had to automate the outreach, the experience for them. And of course that dropped off and, you know, the buyer didn’t get that white glove experience. And now we’re finally at this point where, no, your, The best sales process you’ve ever had, the best go-to-market process you’ve ever had, you can now duplicate that for every single one of your customers and prospects, whether they are three people in a garage or they are.
You know, Accenture, you know, and I think that is such a cool place to be. and I guess just for our listeners, you talked about this experience, through Mutiny, like where is this experience starting? Is this starting on the website? Is this starting in an email? Can this start, you know, it doesn’t matter.
It is able to shift and meet your buyers where they are.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, I mean, we view it as it should meet them where they are. So most of our customers, um, are initiating this experience from. All sorts of different channels. So if somebody comes to the website, we can identify them and show them the experience.They can come into it directly from ads, they can come into it from emails.
Usually that’s something that the sales team gets really excited about, right? The more deep personalization you put in front of sellers, the more excited they get, cause that’s what they’ve wanted from marketing their whole lives. Uh, and so they, and then especially pulling in their own notes, their own sort of priorities and things that they know about that account, um, and.
You know, doing that for them in a way that doesn’t require hours and hours of work from them, but just handing them the experience, um, they usually get really excited. They want to get back in front of their customers with that, with that experience. And so we look at it as there’s a lot of ways for marketing to activate it without involving the sales team at all.
Just. Produce a lot of value for the sales team, produce pipeline for them and send them those really highly engaged leads. , but also increasingly, uh, I mean, we have, at this point, we have more sales users than we have marketers using the product. The other day, actually one of our customers, um, since you mentioned amplitude, I saw, , our team had posted internally, a video that their sales team, so their enterprise and enterprise BDR had shared a video for their own internal training that basically talked about how they’re using mutiny to book a lot more enterprise meetings. Um, and I think it was probably part of their own internal best practices sharing. Um, they’re a great company.
They have a great sales team, right? So they always like sharing with each other. How can we be better? Um, and it was better than any marketing video and that we could ever create. I was like, can we just ask them for permission for these videos? Because it was absolutely amazing. Right. And that’s what I want.
I think a lot of times, um, when products are built and sold to marketers, sales is very much an afterthought. And it’s like, Oh, well, it’d be great to also have the sales team do this. And then, you know, they go and ask the marketer, what do you think sales wants? And then they’ll build that. For me, like I’ve spent, um, almost half of my career selling as well as marketing.
Right. And so for us, like we have a lot of really good intuition around what sales wants, um, uh, what’s overwhelming for them. What’s just the right amount of information? What are they willing to do? What are they not willing to do? Right. Because there’s a lot of things sales is not willing to do. But even though they want the pipeline and we talk directly to them.
to salespeople. We measure like our metrics have, um, they, we measure different things for sellers, um, because we think their experience is going to be really different than marketers. And so. We really try to, uh, treat them like a first class citizen and build products for them that adds a lot of value, but doesn’t require much time from them.
Scott Barker: Yeah, I think that’s so cool when you can turn your customers into just like raving fans and I think social proof is like. One of the number one things in marketing right now is just giving your customers that voice. And like, people don’t want to hear about you and how great you are. But if you see a video of someone talking about it, I think, you know, social proof is kind of that, that last mile is like, you know, we automate everything through AI and then there’s this trust layer that we still need.
And I think that comes through social proof.
Jaleh Rezaei: totally. I mean, um, we, you mentioned something, um, which I thought was so well phrased that Mike, I should steal that exact, uh, blurb and make sure we talk about our product in that way, which was just the scale of things, right? Like this is something you could only do for, um, Uh, the top enterprise accounts.
Um, and now you can really deliver this type of experience to, you know, all of your target accounts, hundreds, thousands of them. Um, and I think that’s really, really cool. We had an enterprise customer who launched a one to one campaign the same day. Um, so from the landing page being created, the data, like everything is in there.
One of the things that we spend a lot of time with this release and, and the usage of AI specifically on this problem. So, you know, when we started, we were much more focused on the experience and the personalization, um, and we expected our customers to bring in the data. What we learned was that everyone’s data is dog shit.
And so no one has good data for personalization. And so what people would do was they would take the data from their CRM. And that’s if they even had it. Then it was really messy. So then they would export it into a CSV and then they would write all these formulas to clean up the data and concatenate things together.
And they would have the BDR team jumping in and filling in the gaps. And it would just take weeks and weeks to just get their data in a way where they could insert it into a landing page. Now with AI. Um, you know, I get really excited when someone’s like our data is really messy. Right. And we’ve increasingly moved up market into larger enterprises and the larger the company, the worse their CRM instances.
It just doesn’t matter. Like your CRM data could be missing. It could be different formats. It could be whatever you want it to be. Um, you can use our AI on top of it to still create a really great message. And if you’re missing data altogether. You can use Mutiny’s data on the company’s priorities, et cetera, to create a really tailored experience.
So it makes it good for new logos, but also for expansion accounts where you do have that data.
Scott Barker: Yeah. I love that. That kind of brings me to the next question around. Just the amount of education that’s needed now, right now, I think for companies is, you know, you, you have to go and, you know, inform them about cleaning up their data and, Oh, actually it’s okay to have this, this way. How do you, how have you as a company thought about educating the market?
Cause I think that’s, it’s huge right now. Everyone is talking about this. Everyone is trying to figure this out. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. How have you found, you know, the, I guess, education piece of either a sales cycle or marketing, becoming more and more important. It does feel like we’re almost back at consultative selling in a real way.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, totally. I mean, we definitely do, uh, a lot of that, um, in, I would say in our sales cycle, um, we are very product forward because I think a lot of this stuff, um, and I know that in enterprise sales, you’re not supposed to be very product forward, right? It’s all about, well, tell me about your goals and you know what you’re doing.
And I think that type of discovery and learning is definitely very important. But if your product does something that to them feels like magic, it’s kind of a mess to not show that. And some of the capabilities of the product, it’s just so much easier to show them. Right. So like, for example, we use AI to inherit all of the company’s, um, you know, brand styles and font and colors and, and, you know, button radius and all that stuff.
Right. It’s a process that takes our AI a few seconds, right, to, to, to do for them. We also can create their first draft based on any existing content that they have. So our AI is, goes and scrapes from something that exists. It used to take. You know, an enterprise company, um, weeks to build a landing page as the starting point that they could then, you know, personalize all the way.
Scott Barker: Those days weren’t fun.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, totally. It’s. Yeah. And so telling somebody that versus, you know, our rep just has their screen up and is like, great, let’s create a landing page for you. And so usually what we do in our process now, um, is we, we ask them for a few target accounts that they want to go after. Um, and we just live built the experience for them and they’re blown away.
Cause as they sit there, you know, we address all their problems. They’re like, oh, but my data is really messy. And it’s like, well. It doesn’t matter. Here’s how we deal with messy data. Um, but it takes us forever to create a web experience. Actually, it doesn’t here. We just did it for you. Like, does this seem like something you would ship?
And they’re like, yes. Right. So I think being product forward, um, against that, um, historical wisdom is probably a good idea for companies that are performing magic with, with AI. Um, I think the other part of it is, uh, just to your point around education, right? We’re, we’re spending a lot more time talking about processes that people might have historically thought lies outside of the mutiny product.
For example, we just released this sales and marketing survey. It follows my two rules for this type of marketing, which is it has to be extremely useful for the end customer. So what is something that they would really value and get a lot out of? And then, of course, you want it to be connected to your product because otherwise.
You know, you don’t really get much value out of that as a company and you want both parties to get value. Right. And so for us, sales and marketing working together is a really big theme. Um, you cannot build great product experiences for the customer, a great buying experience, if you do not have sales and marketing working together.
And I very much believe that technology can drastically simplify how sales and marketing work together. Eliminate a lot of what was historically hours and hours of. Meetings and manually, you know, slogging through these types of things, you can now use AI to make those things really fun and magical and fast.
We were really interested in just what is the state of sales and marketing collaboration and what’s. Slowing people down and how can we help them with that? I think those types of things are definitely very important to help people get, have a new lens on problems that they might’ve thought they can never solve because for as long as they’ve been alive, sales and marketing have fought like cats and dogs, but actually with this new technology, there is now a path to solving some of these things.
And building experiences for customers that was never possible before.
Scott Barker: Yeah. Well, let’s dive right into that because I think it’s the, I think people have been talking about sales and marketing alignment for, you know, as long as I’ve been in, in tech and it’s still a problem, it still hasn’t gone away. and it’s now, I think a particularly interesting time because of it.
It really feels like the lines are blurring between what is sales and what is marketing. You know, I’m certainly seeing almost like. Uh, the rise of the generalist again. And I still think there’s more of like a generous generalist around sales, generalist around marketing, but you do get these folks that kind of can float between and understand the more kind of like GTM engineers that are more on the, the technology side.
but I know, you know, you guys released this fantastic report where you actually went and I think talked to over 500 sales and marketing leaders. would love to, you know, if you could share with the listeners some of the findings from that. Report and then maybe we’ll wrestle with some actionable steps to get some more alignment within our teams.
Jaleh Rezaei: There was some really interesting stuff in there. At the highest level, 97 percent believe that sales and marketing alignment would help the bottom line for them. Like it would help them grow faster. It would help them get more revenue. So basically everybody, and we also dug pretty deep with the survey.
So we looked at, you know, how are they doing in terms of performance against their goals, as well as. You know, ask about behaviors so that we could start to see what leads to good performance and bad performance. And so we also were able to very much confirm the business case for this, which is teams where sales and marketing is aligned.
They are 2. 3 X more likely to significantly exceed their goals and misaligned teams are 2 X more likely to miss. So a very clear business case is that when these two teams are working together, you know, people’s intuition is right. It will lead to more revenue. It’s not a fluffy thing. Um, um, but 82 percent fantasize about replacing each other.
Scott Barker: That was my favorite, favorite stat in the, in the report. So something’s something amiss there, right? You’re like on one side, 97 percent are saying, Oh, we need to get closer together. And then 81 percent are like, yeah, but that person’s an idiot. So we should, we should get rid of them.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, totally. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of opportunity, let’s just say.
Scott Barker: Yeah. Yeah. I think if you’ve ever been a part of a truly aligned team, it feels just so different, like so, so different. You’re like, wow. Oh, this is how it’s done. Uh, I know there was, I would say periods of time at outreach, not maybe the whole four years, but that we knew like, oh wow, between sales marketing, rev ops, like we’re all. Rowing the same way. And this just feels right. And you could tell just by the customer reaction, like we were hitting every number. and then, you know, you fall into the other ways when you’re like, Oh, there’s maybe a new leader or new teams or new things that have come up that make that alignment just more, more friction.
and so I guess. Because alignment can be fluffy. Like, how do we make this actionable for folks? Like, what are some steps you can take? Because everyone wants to be on those aligned teams that are 2. 3x more likely to hit their number. But what do I do?
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah. So, 1 of the interesting things from the survey was that, I mean, I thought that the number 1 thing would be around goals. Oh, we’re misaligned at the highest level. The goals are not aligned. Um, but I actually, um. You know, I think that a lot of teams, at least over the course of the past 10years, I’ve seen a lot of folks move towards pipeline as a goal.
And I think that’s helped a lot. And in the survey, we saw 70 percent have goal alignment. So they said that goals are not, of course you can always get better at goals and break them down further, et cetera. But I think as a marketing team, if you are tracking towards pipeline and not, not the historically more BS metrics, um, I think you’re already on a really good path in terms of alignment with the sales team.
And we saw 70 percent self-reported that they have that alignment. Um, the stuff that was really missing, uh, was all about the day to day execution and how information flows between these two teams. So a lot of stuff around, um, marketing doesn’t know what. Talks to customers about, and therefore the campaigns that we launched, the messaging is not informed, uh, of, you know, what actually is happening on the front lines, uh, lots of mentions around lack of personalization.
In the marketing and that frustrating the sales team, because they have a lot of that know how in house, um, uh, campaign feedback, I would say kind of the reverse of it was true for the marketing team that they’re not getting enough collaboration and buy in from the sales team, um, to give them feedback on those types of things.
other things that, you know, were really salient was the lead handoff. So sales doesn’t really understand, you know, you give them a lead and their Score is 98 and they’re like, okay, like, I don’t really trust this. I don’t know where 98 comes from. I think this is a bad lead. And then of course, marketing being upset that sales isn’t working those leads.
so I think a lot of it, like if I had to, you know, we didn’t phrase it in this way in the survey, cause we weren’t sure what was going to come back, but now when I look at the results and read through everything, it’s really about information, not flowing.Between the two teams, they are missing context from the other.
And I think over the years, like we’ve just really siloed these teams, right? We’ve said, okay, there’s the marketing experience and then there’s the sales experience, as opposed to there is a buyer experience and these two teams collaborate and they have information and tools, um, and skills that are really useful for different parts of that.
And how do we bring all of that together? So I think in terms of. What can you do? Um, um, well, let’s start with the non technology stuff, right? So, uh, first of all, as a person that believes in the relationship, um, based sort of process, um, between the sales team and the buyer side, I believe in that even more for the internal team, which is the sales and the marketing team.
So I think the very first thing is pick who your counterpart is in sales and don’t worry about. You know, maybe you hate the CRO and you know, you think you should have a different one, and hey, maybe one day you will. But I think, uh, in terms of what’s in your influence of control, just focus on who is your immediate peer and sales counterpart that you should be working more closely with and just set up time with them and really get to know them.
And, and I honestly think you can probably take our survey. And kind of craft a narrative of that for why that could be helpful for you. I live in Claude. It’s my best friend. Um, my husband Tyler’s like, are you cheating on me with, um, uh, with a man named Claude? Um, and I am. I probably spend more time, um, on that, uh, than any other tool.
And so, like, I would just go to chat GPT, Claude, whatever you use. Um, Upload our report and give it a little information about you. Like, are you new? Is your sales counterpart new? What are your company initiatives where sales and marketing working together is important. Maybe you’re trying to move up market.
Um, maybe you’re trying to break through a new vertical. Um, you know, every company has a few things that they make. This point of sales and marketing working together, really, really critical. Um, and so give that information and the report is like, okay, give me a little narrative of like, get me ready for this conversation with my sales counterpart.
You know, what, what’s the reason why we really need to work closely together. Um, or you can do it the old school way, read the whole thing and, and, and, and come up with the pitch. But I can’t imagine. Um, if you’re in sales or in marketing, you go and try to have. You know, direct conversation about how much you want to build a relationship with them and work more closely.
And if you connect that to your goals, um, that you’re not going to get a great response. Um, and then I think from there, you know, what I would do is. If I would then, you know, map out the things so we get to know each other as people, obviously, um, and there’s some really good exercises for, you know, the touchy-feely side of things.
But let’s say, you know, you, you get through that. I would really map out. The areas in which sales and marketing have a lot of recurring interaction. Um, so where are the arteries, right? Like, where are we constantly doing handoffs between these teams or, you know, where are the biggest, highest leverage touch points?
Um, so maybe you’re launching a campaign. That everyone in marketing is working on. So that’s really high leverage. Like we want sales to be a part of that because there’s going to be so many interactions as prospects come in, interact with that content, et cetera. Um, uh, the lead handoff is a great example of a very high leverage point.
Um, you know, and you don’t have to boil the ocean, just kind of think through what those are and just pick one. And especially one that you feel like you can influence most quickly, um, and then just say, okay, like, we’re going to make this an OKR and we are going to, you know, we’re going to measure something and then we’re going to measure it at the end of the quarter and see, uh, and that can be something as simple as a survey.
It could be your own, you know, um, it could be just, Okay. Reactions over Slack, like, you know, uh, but I would just pick a thing that you can change and just start by working on that quick win. Um, a lot of times I think, uh, sales and marketing teams, when they, when they want to fix something, they almost think in two scaled of a way like, Oh, we got to, you know, we got to have systems and we need the right leaders.
And I think you can just focus on a quick win and then that quick win. We’ll give you all the momentum to then go do something bigger and bigger every quarter. And so by the end of the year, you can have, you could have made like, really big progress on this. Um, 1 of the things that came up in the survey was about.
80 over 80 percent of the sales team said, and the marketing team actually said that breaking into target accounts is a top priority for their company, but only 15 percent of the sales team thinks that marketing is actually doing a really great job with. Target accounts. So like maybe ABM is the thing that you pick, right?
Um, and it’s understandable why the sales team doesn’t think marketing is doing a great job. Marketing has never had the tool. They’ve always had to choose between that scale and the one to one like we talked about earlier, right? That’s a great thing that can now be solved with technology. Maybe you champion that together.
Um, and you figure out, okay, let’s go, you know, let’s go take these target accounts and let’s go create experiences that makes the sales team be like, oh my God, I cannot believe the impact that marketing had. That’s absolutely something you can do in a quarter.
Scott Barker: A lot of great actionable stuff there. I like this idea of plotting all the recurring interactions that you have between sales and marketing. And I think, you know, the goal there is like, can we make this a wow moment for the customer during this interaction or can we reduce friction? You know, and let’s measure that and see if we’re getting closer to either a wow moment or making this simple, easier, removing, uh, friction.
and I know it wasn’t your main point, but I use ChatGPT all day long. I think it’s a brilliant idea to upload a report that has all this great data, but then give it your specific company information. And how do you make this relevant to my business? I think that’s brilliant. And we’re next.
Steal that and do that all the time.
Jaleh Rezaei: That’s my vision for one to one experiences as well, actually. That’s something we’re working on right now is, um, You know, we have a lot of AI capabilities that are really powerful, that we give to the go-to-market team to create these experiences. In 2025, we want to bring that forward to the end user.
Forrester released a report that I thought was really interesting. 89 percent of, um, and I think it was B2B buyers specifically who are now using generative AI. In every stage of the buying process, and I don’t know if you’ve used those tools as much as I love Claude or I mean, perplexity is also is it is my other boyfriend. Much as I like those tools, they are not actually that good at helping you make software decisions. They hallucinate. They don’t have the right context. Um, but yet. You know, people are, I think, desperate for being able to bring in their own context, right? Their own unique situation and figure out how this product helps me?
Um, is this the right product for me? That’s ultimately what everyone’s trying to figure out. If you’re early in the buying cycle, you’re trying to figure out. Is this interesting enough to really pay attention to? And if you’re later in the process and you’re trying to get to the bottom of that answer of, um, is this the right fit for me relative to alternatives?
Right. And so, you know, that type of, some of those interaction patterns from consumer AI tools are really helpful. And we want to bring that into the experience because as much as we can gather context on a customer, there’s things that they know. That we can bring into the experience and rather than waiting for them to take a call with a BDR, who’s going to try to qualify them.
Why don’t we give them a really great, um, AI powered consumer experience that is much lower pressure. That’s self guided that lets them. You know, share with us what they’re trying to do and allow us to just continually adapt the experience, um, the web experience that they’re getting from us. So I’m really pumped about that.
We’ve got a team working on that right now and, um, we should have some things to announce hopefully in the next couple of months.
CRM
Scott Barker: That’s super cool. I can totally see that world. I mean, I think I’ve said it before on this podcast, but you know, the last time we made an internal software purchase, we were looking for a CRM and you know, that, that started on one of the LLMs. Be like, Hey, make me a short list of the best CRMs for venture firms.
Here’s a little bit of a blurb and it shot me out of the list, but that was kind of, that was, I don’t know, 18 months ago now, now that I’m more familiar with it, I would probably continue down that vein and give it more information of like, okay, you said. Affinity. Here’s Affinity’s URL. Read it. Here’s the workflows I want to create.
Will this be able to do that for me? And that’s a really interesting world. and I think it also highlights the importance of having a one to one experience. If I have a landing page, the website that I’m visiting kind of has some information about me. It’s going to change the messaging slightly to meet my needs.
Therefore, if I put it in an LLM, that LLM is going to believe it’s a better fit for me as well.
Jaleh Rezaei: Totally. Well, and also think about the role that the rep plays in this, right? One of my big beefs with marketing is that marketing and sales is that. Um, you, even though people buy from people at the end of the day, you could interact with a company’s marketing 20 times and you could be like, let’s say JPMorgan Chase and have no idea who your sales rep is, who literally lives and breathes to help you and understand you and your account and probably has like 10 account plans, um, right.
To try to connect how that company addresses your needs. And so. Um, I think that’s definitely, um, uh, there’s a, there’s a lot of opportunity there. And I think there’s things where AI is helpful, but there’s also limitations to how much AI can do for you. And so to your point around one to one experiences, one of the benefits is that you can bring in that human element.
You can bring in the salesperson. And not only does it help build the relationship, uh, right away. Right. They can understand like, Oh, this is Brian. Like I like Brian, like this is, he’s been at this company for a long time. Right. You can start to introduce their face and their experience, but then also, um, as they start to interact, like there’s certain things where Brian’s going to have better answers.
So let’s say, for example. You ask for, Hey, like, I want to see more case studies from large banks. Um, let’s say our AI recommended, uh, FinTech case studies, cause you’re Chase and it sort of puts everybody into finance. So you’ve got a lot of, um, examples and. You know, we showed you the square case study and you’re like, well, I’m a bank.
I’m not really, that’s not the same thing to me. And so you ask for large bank case studies and. You know, I can give you that case study. It can update your resources to actually be okay. Here’s the case study. Here’s why. You can start to interact with it. You can ask it questions, right?
Um, but also, like, maybe, um, maybe you ask about an integration and the doesn’t have a good answer for you because we don’t have good public information on that. Um, and. But the salesperson does, right? Like in this case, Brian has sold to a lot of people. He has a roster of, you know, banks and financial institutions, and he can look at that question and then come back to you with actually like, here’s a really great answer.
Like we have not done a public case study on this, but I had a customer that used this particular integration and here’s how long it takes to activate it. And, you know, and this is, um, this is how it might work. And that’ll start a dialogue with the customer because you’re focused on their needs. I think this is what I mean by relationship based selling, right?
It’s, it’s really about like, how do I put my best foot forward? By showing you that I’ve researched you and that we’re actually giving you a compelling pitch, but then how do we then continue in a very buyer focused way to keep that conversation, keep that conversation going and, and helping them?
Scott Barker: Yeah. I like that world. Uh, I think all this technology is going to just allow us to be more human, spend more time being contextual for their business buying experiences will go up. this has been awesome. And for the listeners, we will put the report, that we’ve been talking about in, uh, in the show notes.
so go and go and check it out. And, uh, throw it in, throw it in Claude and see how it can. How he can inform your, your next sales and marketing, uh, alignment meeting. Well, I have one final question. I always ask this question at the end of every episode and, uh, it is intentionally vague, so you can take it anywhere you want.
The question is, what is one widely held belief that Founders believe to be true today that you think is bullshit or no longer serving us.
Jaleh Rezaei: Well, I mean, related to the topic that we’re talking about, um, and I know I’m going to get killed for this, but I think AI outbound is bullshit. Um, I get it, right? But I think in a lot of ways, it’s like Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. It’s because, like, we think it’s this amazing thing, right? We think it’s going to be all this amazing candy and all these things that we’ve always wanted.
But actually, the more people that use it. The worst life gets for go-to-market people because you now are burning a channel to the ground that actually used to generate a ton of pipeline. Um, right. Like, especially in enterprise, like outbound generates the majority of pipeline, and I think we are not connecting the dots enough of, uh, if everybody starts spamming everybody, then it’s just not going to work.
And, and we are going to reach a point where, um. Um, you know, instead of all the candy, we’re going to go, we’re going to fall down the chocolate river and get sucked into a glass pipe or whatever happened to that kid, you know? Um, and so I think like, if you think go-to-market as hard today, I think it’s going to get a lot harder with, um, with, you know, we’re going to have to, uh, pay our dues on some of the, some of the misuses that we have right now of, um, of AI, but Hey, prove me wrong.
Right. Um, I’d love to see versions of it that ends up being sustainable. Um, I think whenever we can really focus on what is good for the end customer, right, this is a lot of like Jeff Bezos is philosophy as well as like any great product that’s been created in the past, you know, a hundred years is if you can focus on something that actually creates a better world for the customer.
Um, I think those are the things that have longevity, right? So we got to like each other. Apply that universalism principle of if we have a lot more of this, is it still going to work? Is it still going to be sustainable? Um, that’s how I think about building product. Um, it helps simplify the world for me because I have to.
predict the future. And I have to be right about that. And so the way that I simplify is just by asking myself, is this the best thing for the buyer? And if everybody had this, there’s no gimmick factor. Cause you know, in go-to-market, you can do a lot of new things, um, that are not sustainable, but they can work for a little bit.
But if everybody had it. Would they actually want more of this? Does it just totally raise the bar for everybody and it becomes the new norm? And so I really encourage founders to think in that way. Um, um, because I think it’ll help everyone build much better, more sustainable products, especially for go-to-market teams.
Scott Barker: It’s a great, great outlook and yeah, I think it’s, I think there might be a world where an AI STR works and outbound using AI works, but it’s not going to be the way that we’ve always done it, right? Like it’s going to, it sounds cliche, but like we need to really. Take this from a first principle standpoint, I think a lot of what we talked about in the episode is actually a more favorable path to go down.
It’s like, okay, can we now. Use the capabilities we have in AI to create a one to one experience to start a relationship. Cause you’re just trying to start it and can like, can I send Jordan Crawford, one of our LPs is awesome. He’s like, I want to send you an outbound email. That’s so good that you would pay me for it.
Cause I have so much insights and data and research that I’ve done that you would actually be like, Oh, wow, this is, this is so valuable. I pay for that. And I think that is the world. Uh, but I agree that
Jaleh Rezaei: And there are companies that do a good job with that, right? Like there are companies that, um, use AI to go find the signals and create leverage for the salesperson. Um, I just hope that their great emails can still break through the noise and people don’t just buy a product to put on top of their email that just filters everything out.
Scott Barker: totally.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah.
Scott Barker: Yeah. Soon. You’re going to just get my agent talking to your agent.
Jaleh Rezaei: Yeah, exactly. Awesome.
Scott Barker: on. That was an awesome discussion. And uh, to all our listeners, please check out the report. And if your sales and marketing leader and you haven’t checked out the meet new platform yet, I would highly recommend you do so.
And I do say it every week, but you know, listening is one thing, uh, executing something totally different. Hopefully we gave you some ideas, tactics, and strategies that you can bring in to your own business. And, uh, we’ll see y’all next week.
The post GTM 138: The AI Advantage, Solving Sales & Marketing Alignment for Better GTM Execution with Jaleh Rezaei appeared first on GTMnow.
