CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER
Deborah Surrette
Chief Business Officer / Chief Commercial Officer / Enterprise Growth Executive
Building the Commercial Operating System for Your Next Phase of Growth
I partner with founders, boards, private equity sponsors, and executive leadership teams to build commercial operating systems that transform innovative technology into scalable, predictable growth. My experience spans AI, enterprise software, robotics, healthcare, retail, logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain technology, helping organizations commercialize innovation, strengthen customer relationships, and accelerate enterprise value.
Throughout my career, I have helped companies transform how physical goods are bought, tracked, orchestrated, fulfilled, delivered, and ultimately accounted for, from enterprise commerce and procurement to warehouse automation, last-mile logistics, healthcare delivery, and AI-powered operational intelligence.
$127M → $300M+ · Scaled Veho’s commercial platform
$350M → $750M+ · Scaled Sterling Commerce into an acquisition by IBM
$750M → $2.5B+ · Built IBM Smarter Commerce into Watson Commerce
137% ARR Growth · Tulip Retail
215% Enterprise Expansion · Veho
Sustainable growth isn't created by adding more process. It's created by helping leadership teams make better commercial decisions, consistently. That means staying closely aligned with the market, deeply connected to customers, and continually aligning customer priorities with company capabilities as the business evolves.
I partner with founder-led, venture and private equity-backed growth-stage technology companies at moments of commercial inflection—as a Chief Business Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, CEO, board member, advisor, or operating executive.
Featured in McKinsey Logistics Disruptors · Lifetime of Achievement, Supply Chain Digital
For more than two decades, I've built commercial organizations that help technology companies scale from early product-market fit to global enterprise growth. My experience spans IBM, Oracle, GreyOrange, Tulip, Veho, and JudyP, consistently helping companies navigate moments where commercial complexity becomes the next barrier to growth.
Companies bring me in to accelerate moments of inflection — where product-market fit is proven and the challenge is scaling go-to-market in a way that drives growth from today’s pipeline and builds a predictable, high-growth future.
Industries
Enterprise SaaS · AI & Robotics · Supply Chain & Logistics
Healthcare & Pharmacy · Retail Technology · Manufacturing & Industrial
Building Commercial Scale
Veho
Built the commercial operating system for one of the fastest-growing technology-enabled last-mile logistics platforms, scaling from approximately $127M to a $300M+ run rate.
GreyOrange
Commercialized AI-powered warehouse orchestration and operational intelligence for retailers, 3PLs, and enterprise supply chain buyers.
Oracle
Led commercialization of enterprise retail technology across North America.
Tulip
Accelerated enterprise retail SaaS growth, delivering 137% ARR growth from approximately $10M CARR.
IBM / Sterling Commerce
Built one of the industry’s premier enterprise commerce and supply chain organizations. Scaled Sterling from $350M to $750M, then to over $2B following the IBM acquisition.
GFH Designs / JudyP Apparel
Founder and operator, with hands-on ownership of P&L, manufacturing, inventory, supply chain, Shopify, wholesale, DTC, and AI-enabled decision support.
Practical AI Leadership
I’ve built the systems, not just the strategy. I have architected ground-up MarTech stacks with AI capabilities threaded through every layer, from demand generation and lead routing to pricing and merchandising decisions. Most recently, a fun project developing an AI-driven inventory and assortment decisioning platform for our family business, JudyP Apparel, built hands-on with Claude. AI isn't a future initiative—it's a practical component of the commercial operating system.
Recognition
McKinsey Logistics Disruptors — featured interview on robotizing warehouse fulfillment
Supply Chain Digital — Lifetime of Achievement feature
BIO
The CommercialOperating System
The Commercial Operating System
The Six Disciplines of Commercial Scale
A framework for commercial leaders building go-to-market architecture, not just pipeline.
AI doesn't replace the disciplines. It changes how each one gets done.
Element 01 - An honest read of the market
One of five essential disciplines that drive scale and growth. This one is the foundation — the read everything else is built on.
Three questions worth asking:
Could you list the segments your company should not be selling to right now, and would your sales leadership agree with the list?
When you talk about your TAM, are you describing the market your company can credibly serve, or the market you wish you were in?
Are there customers in your installed base today who, if you were starting over, you wouldn't sign?
The piece:
There's a slide in every Series B company that lists the Ideal Customer Profile. It's been there since the Series A pitch, and it's still there at the Series C pitch, and somewhere along the way it stopped describing reality. No one quite remembers when. No one has the standing to take it down.
That slide is usually aspirational. It describes the market the company wants — the logos that would look good in the next raise, the segments the founder finds interesting, the verticals an analyst said were hot. What it rarely describes is the market the company can credibly win in right now, with the product it has and the team it has.
The gap between those two things is expensive, and it's expensive in ways that don't announce themselves as a market problem.
Sales chases segments where the product is a poor fit, because the ICP slide told them to. Win rates in those segments are quietly terrible, but no one segments the win-rate data finely enough to see it. Marketing builds campaigns for buyers who were never going to convert. Customer success inherits accounts that should never have been sold, then gets measured on the retention of customers who were a bad fit on the day they signed. The product team takes feature requests from customers who aren't really the customer, and the roadmap drifts toward serving them.
Every one of these looks like a different problem. A sales problem. A marketing problem. A churn problem. A roadmap problem. They are usually the same problem: the company never did an honest read of its own market.
An honest read is not a market-sizing exercise. TAM math is the easy part, and it's usually the part companies over-invest in — a number on a slide, big enough to justify the raise. The honest read is harder because it asks the company to say true things that aren't flattering.
It means naming the segments where the company keeps losing and being specific about why. It means looking at the installed base and identifying the customers who, if you were starting over, you would not sign — and noticing what they have in common. It means separating the ICPs that are genuinely worth selling to from the ones that look attractive on paper but cost more to acquire and keep than they will ever return. And it means the CEO and the head of sales agreeing on a do-not-sell list, out loud.
That last one is where most companies stall. A do-not-sell list has a cost — it means walking away from revenue that's in the pipeline right now. A team under pressure to hit a number will always find a reason to keep the bad-fit deal in the forecast. The honest read only holds if the leadership team is willing to absorb that short-term cost.
Everything else in the commercial system is built on this read. The message is aimed at this market. The team is aligned around this market. The distribution motion is designed to reach this market. The engagement model is built for these customers. When the read is wrong, every discipline downstream is executing well against the wrong target.
Element 02 - Message to the market
One of five essential disciplines that drive scale and growth. This one is the message — the version of the truth every customer-facing team has agreed to tell.
Three questions worth asking:
If you stopped five customers in the parking lot and asked what your company does, would they describe it the way you do?
Is the message you're taking to market about what your product does today, or about where it's going?
Does your message sound like every other company in your category?
The piece:
The company message is the version of the truth that every customer-facing team has agreed to tell. In most companies, no one's checked recently whether everyone is still telling the same one.
Here is the test. Stop five of your customers — not your champions, your ordinary customers — and ask each of them what your company does. Then ask five of your salespeople. Then your customer success team. Then read your homepage. One answer means you have a message. Six answers mean you have a positioning deck that no one operates from.
Most companies have six. And the six aren't random — they drift apart along predictable lines.
Sales tends to describe a slightly future version of the product, because the future version is easier to sell. Marketing describes the version that tested best in the messaging workshop. Customer success describes the version they spend their days supporting, which is usually the most accurate and the least exciting. The founder describes the vision. And the customer describes whatever problem your product happened to solve for them, which may be a small corner of what you think you do.
None of these people are wrong, exactly. They're all describing something true. The company has just never decided which truth is the one everyone commits to telling — so the market hears a slightly different company depending on who it talks to.
This has a cost, and the cost compounds. A prospect hears one thing from a webinar, another from a sales rep, and a third once they're a customer. Each gap is a small breach of trust. Deals slow down because the buyer can't get a stable picture of what they're buying. Win rates soften — not because the product is weak, but because the story is unsteady. And the most expensive version: the customer buys the future-version message, receives the current-version product, and spends their first ninety days quietly disappointed. That's where churn is born, long before the renewal conversation.
There's a second failure mode, and it's quieter. The message is consistent — everyone tells the same story — but the story sounds exactly like every competitor's story. The same three adjectives. The same category language. The same promise. A consistent message that doesn't differentiate is better than a fragmented one, but only barely. The buyer still can't pick you out of a lineup.
A good message does two hard things at once. It tells the truth about what the product does today — concretely enough that the customer who buys it is not surprised by what arrives — and it carries a credible vision of where the product is going, so the customer is buying a trajectory and not just a snapshot. Most companies do one or the other. They sell the snapshot and bore the buyer, or they sell the vision and disappoint them. Holding both at once takes someone owning the gap between the truth of today and the vision of tomorrow, and keeping every customer-facing team telling the same calibrated story — close enough to today to be honest, far enough toward tomorrow to be compelling
Element 03 - Do We All Agree on What the Product Does?
One of five essential disciplines that drive scale and growth. This one is internal alignment — the one teams notice last.
Three questions worth asking:
Does your team agree on what the product does today, or are there several versions in the room?
When you discount in a deal, is the reason the same across deals, or different every time?
Could your team defend your list price as a function of the value the product creates?
The piece:
It's a strange question to ask a leadership team, and most teams don't ask it.
But if you do — separately, around the table, in their own words — you'll usually get four or five different answers. Sales describes the version they're pitching, which is slightly future. Product describes the version on the roadmap, which is even more future. Customer success describes the version they're supporting, which shipped twelve months ago. Marketing describes some composite drawn from all of the above. And the CEO has a fifth version, made of pieces of each, weighted toward what the board last asked about.
This is not a communication problem. It is a definition problem. The product, as understood by the company, doesn't have a single canonical version. There are several, all in use simultaneously, and no one's job is to reconcile them.
The downstream consequences are familiar even when the cause isn't. Sales over-promises because they're working from the future version. Customer success under-delivers because they're working from the past version. Marketing's positioning lands in market and customers describe the company in language that sales doesn't recognize. Forecasts miss because the deals being closed are for capabilities that won't ship in the quarter the deal closes.
And then there's pricing.
Pricing is where the misalignment shows up most expensively. If the team can't quantify the value the product creates for the customer — in dollars, in time saved, in risk reduced, in revenue generated — they can't price it with conviction. The price gets set by competitive benchmarks instead of customer value. Discounts come fast in every deal because no one can defend the list. Renewals get tense because the customer renegotiates every year against a price the team itself is uncertain about. Sales stops pitching value and starts pitching features, because features are concrete and value isn't.
This isn't a pricing problem. It's the same alignment problem in a different costume. A team without a shared, current, accurate definition of what the product does for the customer can't put a defensible number on it. The price tag is the test of whether the value is real and shared.
Companies that have this discipline can answer two questions cold: what specific problem does the product solve, in quantifiable terms, and is the price worth it to the market that has those problems. When both answers are clear, pricing becomes a strategic lever. When either is fuzzy, pricing becomes a perpetual negotiation.
A few things make all of this hard to fix. The first is that the question feels remedial — it sounds like the kind of thing a kindergarten teacher would propose, and senior teams resist asking it. The defensiveness is part of why the misalignment persists. The second is that there's no clean owner. Product owns the roadmap. Marketing owns the message. Sales owns the pitch. Customer success owns the post-sale reality. Finance owns pricing. None of them owns the definition of what the product is right now, in language all five functions agree to. The third is that the gap between what the product does today and what it will do soon is genuinely unstable — software ships every two weeks, and by the time everyone's agreed on a version, the version has changed.
The companies that get this right don't solve the problem so much as manage it. They accept that the canonical version will always be slightly out of date, and they invest in the operating cadence — and the leadership ownership — that keeps the gap small enough not to break the rest of the system. Pricing follows from that work.
Element 04 - Distribution
One of five essential disciplines that drive scale and growth. This one is distribution — how the company actually reaches the market it has decided to serve.
Three questions worth asking:
If direct sales missed by 20% next year, would the company still hit its number?
Do you know whether a deal sourced through a partner has a better, worse, or unmeasured cost-of-sale than a direct deal?
Is your partner program a real motion, or a slide deck people refer to in QBRs?
The piece:
Most growth-stage companies have exactly one distribution motion: direct sales. They hire reps, build a pipeline, manage a funnel, and when they want more growth, they hire more reps. It works, up to a point. The point is usually where the company starts trying to scale.
A direct sales motion is a powerful thing, but it has three properties every CEO learns the hard way. It takes time to mature — a new rep isn't productive for months. It is expensive to scale — every increment of growth means another fully-loaded headcount. And it is costly to enable — the training, the management, the tooling, the comp. None of this makes direct sales wrong. It makes direct sales insufficient on its own for a company that needs to grow faster than it can hire.
This is where a partner ecosystem earns its place — not as a replacement for direct sales, but as a motion that runs alongside it and does what direct sales can't do alone.
A real ecosystem — 3PLs, integration partners, technology partners, the specific mix depends on the business — changes the commercial economics in four ways. It expands the number and size of the deals the company sees, because partners bring their own relationships and pipeline. It accelerates revenue, because a partner-sourced deal often moves faster than a cold direct deal. It diversifies the customer base, which reduces the concentration risk of depending on a single motion hitting its number. And it frequently drives down the overall cost of sale, because partner-influenced revenue doesn't carry the same fully-loaded headcount cost as purely direct revenue.
That's the promise. Here's why most companies don't get it.
Most companies treat partners as a marketing layer. There's a partner page on the website, a partner logo slide, a partnerships line in someone's title, an annual partner event. What there isn't is a motion — a real operating system with sourced-revenue targets, partner enablement, deal registration, joint pipeline reviews, and a cost-of-sale that someone actually measures. The partner program exists as a deck people refer to in QBRs, not as a channel the forecast depends on.
The tell is simple. Ask a company what its partner-sourced cost-of-sale is, compared to its direct cost-of-sale. A number means the company has a real motion. A pause means the company has a partner program in name only — and is leaving the economic advantage of the ecosystem on the table.
Building the real version is work. It means deciding which kinds of partners actually extend the company's reach, and being as disciplined about partner fit as about customer fit. It means resourcing partner enablement the way direct-sales enablement is resourced. It means designing the commercial terms so the partner motion and the direct motion compound rather than compete — so a rep and a partner are never fighting over the same deal, and the comp plan doesn't punish anyone for routing a deal the most efficient way. And it means inspecting the partner pipeline with the same rigor as the direct pipeline, in the same reviews, against real targets.
A company that does this has an answer to the question every board eventually asks: if direct sales misses, does the year miss? For a company with one motion, the answer is yes — the whole plan rides on a single team hitting a single number. For a company with a real ecosystem running alongside direct, the answer is no.
Element 05 - Executive Customer Alignment
One of the essential disciplines that transforms suppliers into strategic partners.
Three questions worth asking:
Could your executive team clearly articulate the strategic priorities of your ten largest customers?
Do your customers understand your company’s long-term vision — and believe it supports their own?
Does leadership regularly validate that customer priorities and company capabilities remain aligned as both organizations evolve?
The piece:
Technology alone rarely creates enduring customer relationships. Alignment does.
The strongest executive teams understand that customers are not simply buying software, robotics, AI, logistics, or technology. They are investing in business outcomes — growth, productivity, operational excellence, risk reduction, and competitive advantage.
That requires more than executive visibility. It requires executive understanding.
Leadership has to know what matters most to the customer, how those priorities are changing, and where the company’s capabilities, values, product direction, and commercial strategy can create measurable success.
When that alignment exists, conversations change.
Relationships move beyond products and pricing. Executive discussions become centered on business outcomes. Product strategy becomes more informed by customer reality. Customer success becomes more measurable. Growth becomes less about pushing the next transaction and more about building mutual value over time.
In smaller, high-growth companies, this matters even more. A handful of strategic customers can shape the next stage of the business. If the executive team is too far from those customers, the company loses one of its best sources of market intelligence.
Executive customer alignment is not about inserting senior leaders into every deal.
It is about ensuring that the company remains close enough to its most important customers to understand where value is being created, where trust is being built, and where the next stage of growth is likely to come from.
Element 06 - The Commercial Scale Playbook™
One of the questions I am asked most often is whether commercial success can be reduced to a playbook.
The answer is yes—but not in the way most people think.
A playbook is not a sales methodology. It is not a collection of scripts, process maps, or qualification frameworks. It is the shared way an organization makes commercial decisions as it grows.
Every successful company has one.
Some are documented.
Most are not.
The Commercial Operating System describes the disciplines that create commercial scale. The Commercial Scale Playbook is how those disciplines become part of the operating rhythm of the business.
Three questions worth asking:
When your leadership team faces an important commercial decision, is there a shared way of evaluating it, or does the answer depend on who is in the room?
As your company grows, is your best commercial thinking becoming part of the organization, or does it still live inside a handful of experienced people?
Could a new executive join your leadership team and understand how your company goes to market by observing how decisions are made?
The piece:
Every company reaches a point where experience is no longer enough.
The founder can no longer be in every customer meeting. The head of sales cannot personally inspect every opportunity. Product decisions become more complex. New leaders arrive with different experiences and different assumptions about how the company should grow.
Without a common operating philosophy, commercial decisions begin to fragment.
Sales optimizes for the quarter.
Marketing optimizes for awareness.
Product optimizes for the roadmap.
Customer Success optimizes for renewals.
Each function may perform well, yet the commercial system becomes less aligned over time.
The purpose of a commercial playbook is not to standardize people.
It is to standardize judgment.
It captures the principles that guide decisions, the operating disciplines that leadership expects, and the commercial behaviors that allow the organization to scale without losing the qualities that made it successful in the first place.
That includes how the company evaluates markets, how customer value is defined, how executive relationships are built, how opportunities are qualified, how partners are developed, how forecasts are inspected, and how AI is applied to improve execution rather than replace it.
A good playbook evolves.
Markets change.
Customers change.
Products mature.
Competitive landscapes shift.
The playbook should evolve with them, while preserving the commercial principles that define how the organization creates value.
The Commercial Operating System provides the architecture.
The Commercial Scale Playbook ensures that architecture becomes the way the company operates.
Ultimately, scale is not created by adding more people or more process.
It is created when an organization develops a shared understanding of how commercial decisions are made, how customer value is created, and how leadership keeps those two things aligned as the business grows.
Who Owns AI in GTM?
The cross-cutting layer that runs through all five disciplines. This one is AI strategy — and most companies still haven't decided who owns it.
Three questions worth asking:
If a board member asked tomorrow who owns AI strategy in GTM at your company, would the answer be one name or several?
Are you measuring AI in GTM by usage (seats, queries) or by outcome (cycle time, conversion, retention)?
Has anyone on your team articulated which AI use cases are quick wins versus projects, and which aren't worth doing?
The piece:
The question sounds simple. The answer almost never is.
In most companies, AI in GTM is a scattered set of activities. Marketing bought a generative AI tool to write subject lines. Sales is testing a call-coaching add-on. Customer success has a churn-prediction model someone in product built. RevOps maintains a forecasting dashboard. Each of these is real, each has a champion, none of them rolls up to a single person, and the company calls this an AI strategy.
It isn't. It's a tool stack with a story.
A real AI strategy for GTM is owned by one person, and that person is the head of RevOps. RevOps is the function with the data, the systems, and the cross-functional sightlines to actually do the work. Sales has the relationships but not the data infrastructure. Marketing has the tools but not the post-pipeline visibility. Product has the model-building capacity but no commercial accountability. RevOps sits in the middle of all of them — and a well-resourced head of RevOps is the one person on the org chart who can credibly own the entire AI motion.
The work itself looks like four things, and a good head of RevOps can name them cold.
Triage. Which use cases are low-hanging fruit, and which ones are projects. Most companies skip this step and try to industrialize too early. The first job of an AI strategy is to figure out which problems are solvable with existing tools in a quarter, which need a cross-functional project, and which aren't worth solving with AI at all.
Acceleration. Where AI can take time out of the existing motion. Faster lead routing, qualification, proposal generation, onboarding, expansion identification. The frame isn't "what new things can AI do for us?" It's "where in our current workflow are we losing time, and which of those losses are addressable?"
Improvement. Where AI can make the numbers move. Conversion rates in digital marketing. Sales cycle length. Win rates by segment. Time-to-first-value in onboarding. Net revenue retention. Forecast accuracy. Each has a benchmark and room to move, and the strategy is measured by whether the numbers actually improve.
Innovation. Where AI changes the motion itself. The first three are about doing today's work better. Innovation is about finding the use cases that change what the work is — predictive ICP modeling that identifies customers no one had thought to target, customer health scoring that catches churn signals six months earlier, partner economics measured deal-by-deal instead of program-by-program. The companies that lead in AI in GTM aren't the ones with the longest tool list. They're the ones whose head of RevOps is treating the function as an innovation lab, not a reporting layer.
The companies that get this wrong tend to make one of three mistakes. The first is putting AI strategy in marketing — when marketing owns it, sales and customer success use cases get under-served and the work fragments by function. The second is treating AI as a CTO problem — a CTO can build the platform, but only RevOps can decide which problems on it are worth solving for the commercial team. The third is leaving it ownerless, which is the most common version and the one that produces the tool-stack-with-a-story outcome.
A real AI strategy for GTM has a name attached to it, a budget under it, and an innovation roadmap behind it. The name is the head of RevOps.
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