One of the best things about Stage 2 Capital is getting to collaborate and learn from our network of smart, curious Limited Partners. No matter how much I think I know about go-to-market strategy, I find myself gaining new insights and approaches every time I speak to one of our seasoned go-to-market executives. And so do our portfolio companies — matching LP expertise with the needs of our investments is central to Stage 2’s success.
One such expert is Dini Mehta, who first joined us as a Limited Partner in 2021. As a Chief Revenue Officer, she has two successful $100M+ exits under her belt, most recently at Lattice, the HR management platform. Currently, she’s an Executive in Residence at Peak XV Partners, where she helps founders scale up go-to-market strategies and tactics.
I wanted to get her take on what she’s seeing in terms of go-to-market trends, especially around artificial intelligence and team composition, given the labor market changes we’ve seen in the past three years.
Go-to-market trends: do more with less
I asked Dini for her perspective on how early-stage companies are adapting to the go-to-market (GTM) headwinds we’re seeing in 2024: higher interest rates, price sensitivity among buyers, and a fluctuating labor market.
“People have become very skeptical about buying new tools and solutions, which puts extra pressure on GTM teams to do more with less,” she said. “One of the other big trends I’m seeing, and where I'm spending a lot of time advising founders, is cutting costs while being in the growth phase.”
Dini says that cost-cutting pressure is causing founders to explore building cross-border teams earlier than they may have done in the past. By hiring people in lower-cost countries, companies can maintain momentum, continue to hire, and increase gross margins while spending less.
Not every company is off-shoring teams, though, and even those that do are hiring smaller teams. “The number of hires has gone down quite significantly in most growth plans I’ve seen,” Dini said. “And typically, companies are hiring less in revenue operations and enablement. As a CRO, I don’t like to see that because operations and enablement are the back-end infrastructure that we need in order to scale.”
Smaller, more generalized GTM teams
The notion that founders are choosing to pursue smaller or cross-border GTM teams in many cases made me wonder about team structure. Companies are hiring fewer people, but who are they hiring?
“A few years ago, the trend among early-stage companies was to hire for specific, specialized positions very early on,” she said. “But given the macro trends we’re seeing, I’m now advising founders to take a more generalist approach. That’s a great place to start — hiring people who can dabble across the revenue funnel. For example, rather than hiring a team of junior business development representatives, have your account executives do their own prospecting.”
Dini referred to this type of employee as a “generalist athlete” — they may not have every single skill that’s needed but they have the ability to think in terms of first principles, prioritize the most critical aspects of the funnel, and flex into areas where they may have gaps.
So do these generalist athletes tend to be more junior or senior? “It depends,” she said. “Some companies are hiring very senior people, choosing smaller teams and more output. Other companies are going very very junior. It’s binary.”
Dini said she advises companies to really look at the role and base experience on what’s needed. “Instead of over-specializing early on, how do we configure teams to do more with less? Often, you need somebody to come in who already has the expertise for the role,” she said.
A great example is revenue operations — there is no replacement for expertise. “That’s the place where every company should invest in experience,” she said. “For sales enablement, you can get away with junior roles.”
And for companies with tough choices to make in terms of functional areas, Dini’s advice is similar: Look to the market you’re playing in.
“If you’re in a high-velocity, transactional space, you’ll want to invest in demand generation,” she said. “If you have a complex solution and longer sales cycles, product marketing is the way to go. If it’s mostly project-based, look at fractional experts. That is a trend that reflects the reality that we are in. Instead of full-time employees, people are looking at fractional leaders to get the expertise they need for less money.”
A few bright spots amongst the AI hype
While there’s clearly a trend of earlier stage companies approaching the growth phase as lean and efficiently as possible, this is happening concurrently with the massive growth and scale of artificial intelligence solutions. I’ve been wondering how AI is affecting GTM strategy in the real world — is it all hype and LinkedIn ads? Or is it truly changing the way GTM teams operate in practice?
“First of all, AI will fully transform GTM in ways we can’t even imagine right now,” Dini said. “But we’re not replacing all the sales people with AI today. It could happen overtime, but most of what I heard about today is very hyperbolic.”
It also begs the question: Do companies want to replace their sales people? They might not. What most sales people would love to have less of, however, is grunt work. “That’s where AI adds value: the boring, time-consuming work that isn’t client facing,” Dini said.
Dini pointed out that most of the engineers creating AI-based solutions don’t have visibility into all the GTM motions: account list-building, revenue ops, intent data, segmentation. All of that work is essential, complex, and time-consuming.
“At a previous company, we had an entire overseas team focused solely on data enrichment,” she said. “That’s an example of an area where AI can add so much efficiency — taking intent data from all the different sources and consolidating it into the GTM engine. That is one pocket of AI where I see really promising progress.”
Dini said she’s also interested in AI for sales enablement. “More trainings aren’t the answer because sales can never remember where resources are and what there is,” she said. “We need a real-time AI coach that can intelligently serve up the content the sales team needs.”
In that same vein, today’s AI solutions often focus on what to say rather than when or to whom. And so many of them tout quantity over quality, but Dini advises the opposite approach, especially when it comes to outbounding.
“Buyers have become desensitized to outbound marketing; it’s just more noise and it’s not working,” she said. “The companies that stand out are the ones that are very thoughtful about their personas, from ads and value props to positioning and first touches. You have to really study the personas and go deep on them. It’s time-consuming but recipients can tell when a personalized video or piece of direct mail is tailored to them.”
If you can get better at who you’re targeting, and when you reach them, you will see results.