The GTMnow Podcast

Chris McDonough has joined four companies right before they exploded. At the first, Motive, he was employee 40 and watched revenue go from $800K to $30M in about 100 days. The VP of Sales at Campfire joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to break down what he learned riding hypergrowth over and over, and why he thinks AI is about to split the sales profession in two.
Chris gets tactical on the whole arc: how a two-week decision to sign a lease and move to SF changed his trajectory, what a federal mandate taught him about compelling events, why your career growth is tied directly to how fast your company grows, and how he now builds an AI-native sales org from scratch at Campfire (an AI-native ERP taking on the legacy giants). He also makes the contrarian case that AI won't replace reps but will widen the gap between them, why AI outbound is mostly spam for complex B2B, and why a strong SDR bench is existential.
What you'll learn:
The $800K-to-$30M-in-100-days story, and what a compelling event really looks like
Why your career trajectory is tied to your company's growth rate ("you can't be a VP if there's no one to be VP of")
The contrarian AI take: not labor replacement, but a top 30% worth triple and a bottom 20% that's hard to employ
What he hires for now: not just skill, but whether you can self-learn from AI on day one
How to build an AI-native sales org with no tech debt (the deal dashboard that grades every call against every win and loss)
Why AI outbound mostly becomes a spam tool in complex B2B, and why the SDR bench matters more
Why he leaves once a company is big enough to run Workday, and goes back downmarket
How to sell into the "real economy," where nobody cares about your hot VC and references are hyper-local
Regrettable churn: the retention metric behind Samsara's run, and why top reps compound
One-way vs. two-way doors: how to make fast decisions at 70-80% of the data
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:17 Welcome, and a career of joining companies right before they explode
01:51 Employee 40 at Motive, and the two-week decision that changed everything
04:19 The federal mandate, and the hiring class that got promoted in 30 days
05:33 Why career growth is tied to company growth rate
07:12 The mandate story: from selling nothing to 70 demos a week
10:19 Was it the wrong decision? Believing through the objection
10:56 What 800-900 demos in 3 months does to a seller
12:11 Samsara: scaling an office 0 to 100, and 250 interviews in 90 days
13:42 The contrarian hiring philosophy: the 10x seller and the widening gap
15:59 Why he left Rippling for Campfire, and the "Workday rule"
18:41 Building an AI-native sales org with no tech debt
21:14 What Campfire is: AI-native ERP and one of software's last moats
25:25 Expanding the TAM and the recession-proof case
26:12 Selling into the real economy: hyper-local references, not hot logos
28:26 His honest take on AI outbound and AI SDRs
30:49 The SDR org as your existential talent bench
31:56 The metric he obsesses over: regrettable churn
33:45 Who Campfire is hiring, and "will Claude kill this company?"
35:33 Rapid fire: leadership, execution over competitors, one-way vs. two-way doors
40:19 Where to find Chris, and how to actually DM your way into a job

Connect with Chris McDonough:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mcdonough-94546626/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Chris McDonough is VP of Sales at Campfire, an AI-native ERP company competing with legacy incumbents like NetSuite. He was previously at Rippling, and earlier helped scale Motive (formerly KeepTruckin) from $800K to roughly $100M in revenue and Samsara through hyperscale, opening new-market offices in Nashville and Atlanta.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.
Visit us: https://gtmnow.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

The founder and CEO of Electric, Ryan Denehy joins GTMnow to explain why and how he rebuilt Electric as an AI-native software company.

Ryan gets specific on why he split the business in half, how the pivot forced a total change in distribution (from direct sales to embedded channel partnerships with payroll platforms), and why a new product doesn't just need a new channel, it can unlock ones that were impossible before. 

He also shares the ADP partnership that put Electric behind 1,700 reps, the near-death moments (including the night he almost wired his seed round back to investors), how to actually get acquired by a public company, and the cold-outreach framework he's used since making extreme-sports videos at 17.

What you'll learn:
- Why he rebuilt a working company AI-native, and the five-step playbook for a "total reinvention"
- Why product-market fit is as much about distribution as the product, and the Sirius XM lesson behind it
- How going AI-native collapsed his unit price and made channel-led growth possible for the first time
- Why the winner-take-all gap between AI companies is so much wider than in classic SaaS
- The embedded-partnership motion behind ADP, Justworks, and TriNet deals (300+ customers onboarded in a day)
- How to actually get acquired by a public company (hint: people buy companies, corp dev doesn't)
- Why the quietest near-death threat is a splashy senior mis-hire, not a market crash
- The cold-outreach framework he's run since cold-emailing pro athletes at 17

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:04 A 3x founder who sold two companies to public acquirers
01:33 What Electric is, and why "AI" was in the name in 2016
04:40 What a "wholesale rewrite" meant
06:38 Why go AI-native
08:12 The reinvention playbook
13:08 Why they blew the whole thing up
13:48 Distribution as product-market fit: the Sirius XM lesson
15:37 How AI collapsed the price and unlocked channel sales
18:19 The winner-take-all gap between AI companies
20:35 From direct sales to channel
23:00 The three-year channel payoff
25:17 Rebuilding the product and signing the payroll platforms
26:27 The new-category pitch
29:29 Behind the scenes for ADP, Justworks, and TriNet
30:02 Almost wiring the seed money back
32:00 The day everything changed at once
33:52 The quiet damage of a senior mis-hire
35:48 Two prior companies: go-to-market above all
38:18 How to get acquired by a public company
42:55 Extreme-sports videos at 17, and the outreach framework
44:47 Where to find Ryan and Electric

Connect with Ryan Denehy:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandenehy/ 
X: https://x.com/DenehyXXL
Electric: https://electric.ai

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About the guest: Ryan Denehy is the founder and CEO of Electric, an AI-native IT management platform now embedded in payroll and HR products including ADP Team Management, Justworks, and TriNet. A three-time founder, he previously built and sold companies to USA Today and Groupon. Electric is backed by investors including Notable Capital and Slack.

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing the strategies, tactics, and stories from the operators and investors building the next generation of go-to-market.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Ross Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Accord and spent five years leading go-to-market and partnerships at Stripe. He talks to hundreds of CROs and serves thousands of reps, so he has an unusually clear view of what the top performers actually do differently.

His starting point: roughly the top 20%, often closer to 10%, of any sales team drives most of the revenue. Every leader says they want to move the middle 60%, and Ross doesn't think AI is doing it. Tools like Claude and Codex make the people who already have the taste and judgment far more efficient, and the gap widens from there. What closes it is unglamorous and human: a leader with a point of view, a shared language simple enough to stick, a field-friendly process, and only then the technology to reinforce it.

Ross gets specific on what "best" means for a seller (trust and EQ first, then frameworks learned so cold they run subconsciously), the disconnect between what CROs think they're buying and what reps actually receive, the "no-ask note" for multithreading into a CRO, why he sells through his own executives instead of around them, and the biggest lesson of his founder journey: market beats product.

What you'll learn:
- What separates the top 10% of reps from everyone else, and why AI is widening that gap instead of closing it
- The two ingredients of a great seller: the "give a shit factor" you can't fake, then plays run so subconsciously you can get creative
- The waiter analogy that explains great salesmanship in one sentence
- Why the people, process, technology order is the one most teams get backwards in the AI rush
- The disconnect between a CRO's multimillion-dollar investment in the field and what reps actually receive: a 76-page laminate, more Salesforce fields, none of it touching the customer
- Why the best methodology is simply the one that gets used, and why debating how many Ps are in MEDDPICC is optimizing the fringes
- "Unavoidable excellence": how to take what your top performers do organically and make it standard across the team
- The "no-ask note" for multithreading into a CRO by showing respect instead of asking for time
- Why CROs own revenue and not tools, and how to sell through their rev-ops and enablement leaders
- "Show, don't tell": leading with peer references at stage two when everyone can sound the same and ship a surface-level solution
- The founder-led sales handoff mistake Ross has made twice, and the curse of knowledge behind it
- Why market beats product, via April Dunford's positioning and the surfer, surfboard, wave framing

Connect with Ross Rich:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossrich/ 

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About the guest: Ross Rich is the founder and CEO of Accord, a platform that operationalizes value selling (quantified business cases, mutual action plans, stakeholder mapping, account planning) in a field-friendly way. Before founding Accord, he spent over five years at Stripe leading go-to-market and partnerships. Accord's customers include Freshworks and Samsara.

About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing how the best in tech build, scale and invest.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Is Salesforce the dominant player in the AI platform shift, or the incumbent about to be disrupted? Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products, sat down with Sophie Buonassisi at Salesforce Tower to answer that directly.

Kris runs the business behind Sales Cloud's 26-year run and its rebrand into Agentforce Sales. He makes the case that CRM is becoming "agentic revenue orchestration," that the category needs a new name, and that the future is headless. For Salesforce, that means surfaced inside Slack, ChatGPT, Gemini, and wherever sellers actually work. He also shares the internal numbers, including an engagement agent that worked the leads Salesforce had always ignored and generated over $100M in pipeline in eight months.

What you'll learn:
- Why 60% of a seller's time goes to non-selling work, and which agents remove it
- The case for renaming the category from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration
- What "headless CRM" means, and why Salesforce integrated with ChatGPT and Gemini
- How one leader manages 100 reps plus the equivalent of 400 agents
- Why the Momentum acquisition matters: "memory fragments" that cut an 8,000-word meeting to the 800 words that count
- Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers, not fewer
- How hiring shifted from "what did you do" to "how do you build" (and why a PowerPoint is now a red flag)
- Pricing in the agent era: seats, flex credits, and a coming leads-worked outcome metric
- Why Kris says we're not in a SaaSpocalypse, and how a 70,000-person company still ships weekly

Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial. See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:12 Welcome, and the Salesforce platform-shift question
02:25 How Salesforce adapted across cloud, mobile, social, and AI
03:32 Why Sales Cloud became Agentforce Sales
05:17 Renaming the category: from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration
06:56 Will anyone log into a CRM again?
08:09 Agentforce in one line, and the seller's Monday morning
09:08 Build vs. buy, vibe coding, and the context moat
11:01 The Momentum acquisition and memory fragments
13:04 Sellers managing teams of agents, and the $100M pipeline story
15:03 The agent stack: prospecting, engagement, pipeline, quoting
16:27 Efficiency, accuracy, and auto-generated forecasts
18:03 Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers
19:16 What the modern sales role looks like
20:08 Sponsor: Primer
21:34 How AI changed hiring: from "what" to "how"
23:48 The window: shipping weekly, not on three annual releases
25:13 What product-market fit means now
26:05 Software vs. services, and the $10T question
28:10 The complexity problem: easy by default, advanced by choice
30:07 Go-to-market evolution and consolidating the stack
32:07 Leading as a player-coach
33:16 Being "chief repetition officer" and educating the field
35:00 How a 70,000-person company stays agile
36:48 The biggest lesson from Marc Benioff
37:57 Pricing: seats, flex credits, and outcome-based metrics
40:53 Are we in a SaaSpocalypse? The full answer
42:08 Where Kris gets his learnings
43:07 World Cup picks

Kris Billmaier (EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales, Salesforce)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisbillmaier/
Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce

Sophie Buonassisi (Host, SVP at GTMnow/GTMfund)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About Kris Billmaier:
Kris Billmaier is EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products at Salesforce, where he leads the business formerly known as Sales Cloud. He oversees the company's agentic sales portfolio, including its prospecting, engagement, pipeline, and quoting agents, and the Momentum acquisition that powers its conversational data layer.

About GTMnow: 
GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest. The media brand is owned and operated by venture firm, GTMfund.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.

Chris Lee joined Deel at $1M in revenue. Now, it just hit $1.5B. He joined GTMnow to walk through the pivotal decisions behind that run, including the ones he's never discussed publicly.

Chris (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel) breaks down the "five-star sales experience" framework he built by studying luxury hotels, why speed itself became a reason customers bought, how he's had zero regrettable director-level attrition in 5.5 years, and why they hire people with the job title "Ghostbuster" to keep a 7,000-person company moving like a 30-person startup. 

What you'll learn:
- The five-star sales experience framework, and how to map your own process from three-star to five
- Why every new sales leader at Deel spends their first 30 days taking inbound and selling
- How speed became the reason Coinbase chose Deel over a legacy vendor with no references to show
- The hire-slow, fire-fast principle behind zero regrettable director attrition in 5.5 years
- Why "tell me about a time" interview questions optimize for the best liar, and the scenario-based alternative
- What a "Ghostbuster" is, and how the role fights operational decay as you scale
- Leading a sales team through public crisis: cry, quit, or fight
- The trillion-dollar thesis: why 95% of the world's workers sit outside the US market
- Why Chris went back to first-principles systems thinking instead of fiddling with AI tools

Thank you to our sponsor:
Primer unlocks B2C ad channels for B2B marketers with precision targeting and next-gen measurement. GTMnow Network exclusive offer: Extended 45 day trial and 15% off with code GTM15 - just apply the code when you go to upgrade from the free trial. See who’s really in your funnel: sayprimer.com

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:58 Welcome to GTMnow
01:33 From Granular (agtech, employee #11) to a DuPont acquisition
05:30 The failed recruiting startup he launched in January 2020
07:17 How he found Deel, and applying to the wrong role on purpose
09:48 The first-30-days lesson from CEO Alex Bouazizi: go sell
11:44 What Deel actually does today
13:14 Scaling a distributed sales org remotely
15:41 Building rapport on a global remote team
17:35 From transactional SMB to multi-product enterprise
20:16 Sales-led, not product-led, and why consolidation wins
22:45 "Deel speed," and why speed is a reason people buy
25:31 Sponsor: Primer
26:57 Frank Slootman, Amp It Up, and outpacing competitors
29:12 How he got Slootman to open the sales kickoff
30:28 Zero director attrition in 5.5 years, and hire slow, fire fast
33:54 Why "tell me about a time" fails, and the scenario-based alternative
37:46 The five-star sales experience framework
41:54 Bringing enterprise-grade experience to SMB with AI
45:49 The trillion-dollar thesis: 95% of workers are outside the US
47:22 Building 60+ payroll engines: the Amazon Prime parallel
53:02 First-principles systems thinking for sales
59:38 The problem-framing framework he gives his team
01:01:09 The "Ghostbuster" role and fighting operational decay
01:05:25 Where to find Chris

Chris Lee (Head of Sales, Americas at Deel):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/techcontrarian/
X: https://x.com/TechContrarian

Sophie Buonassisi (Host, SVP at GTMnow/GTMfund):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona

About Chris Lee:
Chris Lee is Head of Sales, Americas at Deel, which he joined as one of its first sales hires at $1M in revenue and helped scale to $1.5B. Previously he was employee number 11 at Granular, an agricultural tech company acquired by DuPont for $300M.

About GTMnow: 
GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest. The media brand is owned and operated by venture firm, GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund.

Visit us on: https://gtmnow.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
Follow us on X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gtmnow_
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gtmnow_/
The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.