Deborah Surrette

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?

Internal Alignment · Distribution · Engagement Model · AI in GTM

(same format — gut-check questions + full body)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 - Engagement Model

One of five essential disciplines that drive scale and growth. This one is engagement — the motion that runs from the first deal through deep expansion.

Four questions worth asking:

• When was the last time you reviewed your existing customer base with the same operating rigor as your new business pipeline? 

• Is your team trained to uncover real, quantifiable value with every customer — or is that something the senior reps just happen to do well? 

• Do you know how each of your top accounts actually buys, or are you relying on relationships to carry the deal? 

• When a deal closes, do you know whether it closed because the buyer internalized the value — or because someone approved a discount?

The piece:

The engagement model is where the system meets the customer. It's not a sequence of stages — first acquisition, then onboarding, then retention, then expansion — handed off between functions with different metrics and different leadership ownership. It's continuous architecture. The first deal is the start of a motion that runs through onboarding, expansion, advocacy, and back into pipeline. The CCOs who get this right are the ones whose existing customer base is producing 200% growth alongside their new acquisition motion. 

Most companies break this by treating each stage as a different team's job. New acquisition gets the operating rigor. Everything after the first deal gets whatever's left over. 

A real engagement model runs differently. It's built on three things. 

First, the upstream disciplines have to be working. Honest market read. Clear message. A team aligned on what the product does. Distribution that compounds. When any of these is broken, no amount of pipeline rigor downstream will fix it. 

Second, the team has to be trained on engagement tactics that uncover real client value and how each buyer actually buys. That's two skills, not one. 

Uncovering real value means the team can do more than describe what the product does. They can sit with a customer and translate the product's capabilities into the customer's specific situation, in numbers — dollars, time, risk, headcount, revenue. A deal where the team has done this work is a deal where the customer is buying because they've internalized the value. A deal where they haven't is a deal that lives in the pipeline as hope. 

There's a sharper version of this worth naming, because it's where most pipelines quietly leak. Pull your last ten won deals and look for the written business case — the document, agreed with the buyer, that says what the product was worth in the buyer's own numbers. In most companies you'll find it on one or two, and those were your best rep's deals. The rest closed on a demo, a relationship, and a discount. They closed, so no one looked closely. But "it closed" and "it closed on value" are not the same deal, and the difference shows up everywhere downstream.

A team that hasn't done the value work sells the only thing it has quantified, which is price. When the buyer hesitates, the rep reaches for the discount, because no one ever put a number on the value — so the number on the contract is the only thing left to negotiate. The tells are familiar: the buyer says "just send me pricing" and the rep complies weeks before value is established; deals run single-threaded through a champion who likes the product but doesn't own the budget; and a large share of the pipeline dies not to a competitor but to "no decision," the surest sign the value of acting was never made concrete. These look like a discounting problem, a velocity problem, a forecasting problem. They are usually one problem: the team is selling what the product does, not what it's worth.

The fix is unglamorous. Name the three or four outcomes buyers actually pay for and give the team a way to estimate each one in the buyer's own numbers. Co-build the case with the buyer rather than presenting one at them — a buyer who helped build the number defends it to their CFO, and a buyer who was handed one forgets it by the next call. Point the demo, the proposal, and the negotiation back to that case, so a discount request becomes a return conversation. And get the numbers validated by the economic buyer, not just the champion, so the case survives the committee when the rep isn't in the room.

Understanding how each client buys means the team knows the decision process before they're three months into a cycle. Who signs. Who can kill it. What risk the buyer is underwriting personally. What evidence the buyer needs to present internally. This isn't BANT, and it isn't MEDDIC — those are checklists. This is the team understanding the buyer's commercial reality, not just running their own. 

Third — and this is the part most companies treat as an afterthought — retention and expansion have to be planned work, not guesswork. 

Most companies put real operating rigor behind new customer acquisition. Pipeline reviews. Deal coaching. Forecast cadence. Comp design. The same companies leave retention and expansion to whoever's relationship the customer happens to be in. Renewals get worked when they're 60 days out. Expansion gets worked when sales notices a budget signal. The result is predictable: net revenue retention sits at parity, expansion is opportunistic, and customer success runs as a support function instead of a commercial one. 

The companies that do this differently treat retention and expansion as a discipline with the same architecture as new customer acquisition. They build a standard set of retention drivers — the conditions under which a customer renews enthusiastically, renews quietly, or starts looking at alternatives. They run next-best-sale discussions across the customer base on a planned cadence, not when budget appears. They build account planning tactics that the team is trained on and the leadership team inspects. They treat customer success as a commercial function — partnering with sales — not as a service team. 

When this works, the forecast becomes something the leadership team can believe. The new acquisition motion is producing pipeline that converts. The existing customer base is producing predictable expansion. The customers in expansion are referring new customers into the top of the funnel. The motion runs as a continuous system — first deal through 200% growth — on architecture the team owns.

Element 06 - 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.