Lessons from the first 25 episodes of Path to Growth
Our Path to Growth podcast has now surpassed 25 episodes, each one filled with valuable nuggets of wisdom and learnings from today’s most forward-thinking go-to-market leaders. The conversations have been unique, real, authentic and consistently impactful.
Go-to-market leadership today is about way more than just hitting revenue goals. RevOps, Sales, and Marketing leaders need to work effectively across teams, really understand their customers, run tight operations, and create cultures that can grow. In this article, drawn from some of the most resonant moments of those 25+ conversations, we explore the best of Path to Growth.
Effective GTM execution depends on alignment across sales, marketing, RevOps, finance, customer success, and product. Leaders repeatedly emphasized that misalignment—of goals, metrics, and incentives—creates friction and limits growth. The best GTM teams don’t just communicate better; they operate with shared truths and joint ownership.
"The key thing that will help drive a good relationship is having everybody have the same incentives and the same measurement. Like, hey, if this is the metric that we're really focused on, we're all focused on the same metric. Because I've seen many situations where marketing is measured on MQLs, but sales doesn’t care about MQLs, they care about pipeline."
– Meghan Gill, Former SVP Sales Operations @ MongoDB [Full Episode]
“ I think we’ve all seen companies whose outcomes and success were either made or broken by the quality of the leadership team’s relationships with one another. An atmosphere of genuine respect and trust and mutual loyalty is really important. I think building real friendship—in a business context, even if not personal—is absolutely key.”
– Thomas Ricks, VP Enterpise Sales @ Specright [Full Episode]
"I always look at sales as a sports team... I like to have teams that work with each other. They share best practices, they support each other. And then you want to build relationships with the other execs because we can't sell a product that doesn't function for the customer. So we have got to keep giving feedback to the product team on what's working for customers. What's not. What is the next product we need."
– Shirin Oshidari, CRO @ Salus [Full Episode]
"If the goal is to hit ARR, which is the goal of our company... let's have that incentive with the marketing people too. So when we keep saying, 'Hey, we need leads, we need pipeline, we need brand awareness,' they understand we're trying to get to our ARR."
– Shirin Oshidari
Customer-centricity isn’t just about saying ‘we care about customers’. It’s about embedding their reality into every GTM motion. Leaders in these interviews describe a level of empathy and segmentation sophistication that moves beyond personas into a true understanding of jobs-to-be-done, context, and motivation.
"Who exactly is our customer? What do they need? How do we quantify that? And then how do we use that to drive through all of our decision making... so that everyone is independently able to make decisions that are aligned in the same way. Some people are thinking of the customer as a giant enterprise. Some people are thinking of the customer as a tiny startup, and then we're all doing something very different because we're not totally aligned on who the customer is."
– Soumya Srinagesh, SVP Agent Sales @ Zillow [Full Episode]
"What I discovered in marketing is language/market fit... how well are you resonating to your audience so that you get them to take action. And it becomes very complex because humans are complex and especially if you have multiple personas in a buying committee, what's gonna resonate to everybody will differ. And how you communicate with each one of them will differ depending on what stage of the process they are in."
– Alina Vandenberghe, Co-founder & Co-CEO @ Chili Piper [Full Episode]
"Before you have any conversation around technology and features and benefits, you have to have a conversation around pain. We have found that to be true in sales development and sales and success. It doesn't matter. Do not demo until you've talked about pain. Once you've gotten on the same page, everything goes easier."
– Taylor Young, CSO @ CoLab [Full Episode]
"Companies don't buy technology. Humans do. That personal level of selling to a human and knowing that they are buying your technology is probably the most important part of all of this personalization stuff. Does she like to be just the facts? Does she want to talk about her kids? Does she want to be connected to me personally? That’s what personalization really means."
– Soumya Srinagesh
“What we never lost sight of was always listening to the customer. While I’d love to say every product idea came from my experience, the truth is our best ideas come from our team—product managers, engineers, designers, and customer success. They are listening.”
– Jin Chang, CEO @ FieldGuide [Full Episode]
Today’s most effective RevOps teams don’t just track performance—they influence it. From owning segmentation and capacity planning to influencing comp and process, RevOps has evolved into a strategic partner for growth. These leaders show how it’s done.
"It's very easy to focus on aspects of execution that are more like the end of the funnel... but first you have to step back and decide how you're going to market. What are your segments? What are the areas you're focused on? And what behaviors you want to drive from the reps. Then things like territories and comp plans... come from that."
– Meghan Gill
“We developed a balanced performance scorecard—a simple leaderboard combining ARR attainment with five behavior metrics like win rate and outbound opps. You can be top of the leaderboard without just quota—it’s about the right behaviors.”
– Stevie Case, CRO @ Vanta [Full Episode]
“Where are the specific inefficiencies? What’s the data availability like? First of all, that’s a big question in a lot of companies. And then once that’s been sorted out, I start having a look at that 1 percent improvement. What button can I press to make sales 1 percent better, for instance, and that’s where the strategic RevOps of it all comes in… My philosophy has always been: just get the basics right, and then we can move on to the exciting stuff.”
— Anastasiia Binns, Head of RevOps @ Semble [Full Episode]
Culture isn’t fluff—it’s how teams behave, how trust is built (or lost), and how leadership shows up can speed up or sabotage GTM success. These leaders share how they define, preserve, and evolve culture, especially through growth and change.
"Culture is everything in a company because it permeates to the people that you hire and the people that you hire are what are gonna make or break the business. And it's very hard to drive those values, especially in a remote environment when you have 40 different cultures... things mean so many things to so many people."
– Alina Vandenberghe
“Having the predictability and stability of reaction to a chaotic situation can help facilitate communication throughout the company… Then from there, act. Not in a frantic way, but logically. What’s the productive nature of this chaos?”
– Rose Punkunus, Founder & CEO @ Sudozi [Full Episode]
“I’ve had some horrible bosses in my time, and I’m grateful for them because it gives me the clarity about both of how I want to lead, but also the kind of culture that I appreciate being part of.”
– Robin Daniels, Chief Business Officer @ Zensai [Full Episode]
"Our most important job is to hire people that are smarter and better than us and get out of their way so that they can actually drive the company in the direction it's supposed to go... The most important thing is to be able to build a team that together equals 100%. None of us alone can do 100% of anything."
– Joanna Riley, CEO & Co-founder @ Censia [Full Episode]
"I've let people go and I'm still best friends with them because I'm like, hey, just your skill set at this time doesn't work. So it's not personal. We're here to do a job and make our company successful. Just be honest with yourself and your colleagues."
– Shirin Oshidari
“We transformed our sales force from a transactional selling machine to a value-based selling machine… It is not a one-time training. It is a radical change in how you operate your business every day.”
— Stevie Case
"Every person coming in shifts the culture a bit. It's dynamic... and we need to reinforce values constantly through action, not just words. When we were smaller, I could have conversations and reinforce it directly. After 100 people, it changed. I had to adapt my leadership style to scale our culture."
– Alina Vandenberghe
While culture and alignment matter, no GTM motion can thrive if the systems and workflows are broken. Leaders repeatedly cite CRM rigidity, misaligned workflows, and underinvestment in foundational tooling as silent killers of scale.
"What was working 3 months ago doesn’t work now. It’s very hard to nail [distribution] predictably... because markets change a lot and what can be effective in one quarter loses effectiveness in the next because certain things, whenever something works, everybody copies it."
– Alina Vandenberghe
“I’ve worked in a company that had 12 different CRM systems… we were massively underreporting. We had no visibility of anything… The project was actually stupidly simple—just setting up one SharePoint list. But the cultural jump from salespeople not having to report daily, to full transparency—that was the difficult part.”
—Anastasiia Binns
"There are very few good tools for one person communicating with data to make a decision. And the decisions are complex. There's a million other factors, trade offs, all these things need to be discussed. And right now they're doing it in email and PowerPoint decks. Which obviously has serious problems."
– Taylor Young
“Basic data hygiene—that’s a huge problem for so many startups. One of the first things I try to get to is just a baseline metric. It’s hard to say if we’re improving or not when we don’t even know what the baseline is. Then from that point forward we can track: are deal cycles getting shorter? Are conversion rates improving?”
—Jess Schultz, Founder & Fractional CRO @ Amplify Group
Startup roles don’t scale linearly. A top performer at $5M may not be right at $50M. The best GTM leaders understand how to assess, coach, and evolve talent for stage—not just function.
"The success criteria for a zero to 10 million and 10 to 20 and 20 to 30 is very, very different... My board always tells me this, which is stage appropriate talent. And that's actually a mindset that I'm not free from, and neither is my brother and co-founder and CEO. And I actually say that in front of the company, which is there is a new criteria of skills that that person needs to acquire by the time they get to that next stage."
– Kevin Chiu, Co-founder @ Catalyst [Full Episode]
"If you've been battlefield promoted, you've been battlefield promoted for a reason and it's because of your capacity to learn. And you don't have to know every single thing, but you have to acknowledge and be a little bit humble and realize that you don't know everything when you walk into a new role."
– Meghan Gill
"One of the most heartbreaking things about being a founder is that the folks, your leaders who have been to war with for the last three years might not be the right person to take the company through the next three years. But keeping someone you like in their role, knowing they can't scale, hurts everyone."
– Tracy Young, CEO & Co-founder @ TigerEye
Many of our guests offered deeply personal advice based on the mistakes, breakthroughs, and learnings from their own paths. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling your influence, their reflections offer hard-won clarity for navigating a career in GTM.
“You can control two things: your energy and your initiative. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it changes your life. Energy is a force multiplier—it spreads to everyone around you. And initiative means you don’t stay in your box. That’s what gets people to the top.”
– Robin Daniels
"Move slowly with people, but quickly with setting priorities and getting to clarity. People like to know what their priorities are—even if you're going to get it wrong, clarity unlocks momentum."
– Stevie Case
"Be the eager beaver... it might not feel cool, but that’s gonna set you apart."
– Soumya Srinagesh
"Lean into the things that are hard. When I observe that gut reaction—like a body sensation in a conversation—I now make a note. Why did I feel that? That’s probably my biggest opportunity for growth. Earlier, I ignored that."
– Alina Vandenberghe
Today’s GTM leaders must blend analytical rigor with human intuition and heart. Whether you're in RevOps, Sales, or Marketing, the path to growth is no longer just about execution—it’s about alignment, empathy, systems, and understanding people. The voices shared here reflect what modern leadership really looks like, and we deeply appreciate them taking the time to share their perspectives on Path to Growth.
Tracy Young, the co-founder and CEO of TigerEye and former leader of PlanGrid, has a proven track record in scaling tech enterprises, notably leading PlanGrid to a $875 million acquisition by Autodesk in 2018. She is recognized in Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech, has spoken at prestigious events like TEDWomen 2020, and holds a B.S. in construction engineering management.
