Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

What world-class GTM looks like in 2026 | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel, Stripe, Google)

November 30, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

Jeanne Grosser, COO at Vercel and former CPO at Stripe, outlines go-to-market (GTM) as all functions touching customers or revenue—marketing, sales, customer success, support, partnerships—integrated into a single customer lifecycle, treated like a product from awareness to long-term retention.

GTM Evolution and New Roles

GTM has shifted consultative with consumption models and AI, emphasizing embedding with customers via forward-deployed engineering to map needs and feed product insights. A key enabler is the GTM engineer: ex-sales engineers who automate workflows into AI agents. At Vercel, one built a lead-qualifying agent in six weeks (25-30% time), matching human conversion rates while cutting touches needed; it reduced 10 inbound SDRs to one QA'ing outputs, freeing others for outbound. Agents handle rote tasks (research, follow-ups), aiming to boost seller customer time from 30-40% to 70%, with humans in loop for review. Start post-repeatable process (e.g., ~10-person team or $1M ARR), prioritizing legible workflows like inbound first.

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What you'll learn

1 **[05:32] Defining Go-to-Market (GTM)**
2 **[08:55] Shifts in GTM: Consultative Selling & AI Embedding**
3 **[10:18] Rise of GTM Engineers**
4 **[26:05] Scaling GTM: First Hires, Processes & Roles**
5 **[34:33] GTM Tools & Custom AI Agents**
6 **[46:56] GTM as a Product**
7 **[52:57] Key GTM Tactics**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser built world-class GTM teams at Stripe, Google, and, most recently, Vercel, where she serves as COO and oversees marketing, sales, customer success, revenue operations, and field engineering. She transformed Stripe’s early sales organization from the ground up and advises founders on GTM strategy.

We discuss:

1. Why GTM is becoming more strategically important in the AI era

2. The rise of the GTM engineer

3. A primer on segmentation

4. How to build a sales org that engineers and product teams respect

5. The changing calculus of build vs. buy for go-to-market tools in the AI era

6. Why most customers buy to avoid pain rather than to gain upside

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