Jeanne DeWitt Grosser

COO at Vercel

COO at Vercel overseeing marketing, sales, customer success, revenue ops, and field engineering, previously built Stripe's early sales team from the ground up as chief revenue officer, known for building sales orgs that don't feel like sales orgs to engineers and for treating go-to-market as a product.

The Growth Architect The Growth Scientist

Dimension Profile

Strategic Vision 60%

Execution & Craft 65%

Data & Experimentation 40%

Growth & Distribution 90%

Team & Leadership 55%

User Empathy & Research 60%

Key Themes

go-to-market as a product discipline rise of the go-to-market engineer sales orgs that feel like product teams selling to pain versus selling opportunity customer buying journey as unique experience hyper-specialization collapse in GTM roles

Episode Summary

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser shares her approach to building world-class go-to-market teams that don't feel like sales orgs, drawing on experience building Stripe's early sales team and now leading GTM at Vercel. She explains why 80% of enterprise customers buy to avoid pain rather than capture upside, why the go-to-market function should be treated like a product with an integrated lifecycle, and predicts that AI will collapse the 17+ specialized GTM roles into more generalist positions.

Leadership Principles

→ If you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager
→ 80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk versus increased upside — startup founders love to talk about the art of the possible, but enterprise buyers want to avoid missing their revenue target
→ Think of go-to-market as any function that touches a customer or makes a dollar — the integrated lifecycle from awareness to high LTV should be orchestrated like a product

Notable Quotes

"If you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager."
— On the litmus test for hiring technical salespeople

"80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increased upside. We all love to talk about the art of the possible, but for enterprise buyers, you're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter."
— On understanding enterprise buying motivation

"We buy a lot of things because of how we feel about them. The experience of being sold to will increasingly differentiate a company and drive buying decisions if products are only different at the margins."
— On why the buying journey itself becomes a competitive advantage

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