What world-class GTM looks like in 2026

Jeanne is defining "go-to-market" after being asked what the term means in the context of building revenue-generating teams.

For me, I think of it as any function that is going to touch a customer or make a dollar, and actually my remit at Vercel is that, so that includes marketing, sales, all of your technical sales roles like sales engineers or post-sales platform architects is what we call them at Vercel. It's customer success, it's support, it's partnerships.

When consumption-based business models started, I think you saw go-to-market shift into being meaningfully more consultative because often that first land was the very beginning of the journey and represented a very small percent of what you were ultimately going to do with that customer.

80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increased upside, which is a good thing for startup founders to understand. We all love to talk about the art of the possible, everything we're going to enable in the future, but that's often really a sale that's going to resonate with another founder. For everybody else, particularly enterprises. You're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter.

Excellent salespeople typically will talk well under half the time in a conversation because they're out asking questions, probing often helping a customer arrive at conclusions on their own.

I think you want to be able to be innovative and pivot and when you have a well-designed sales plan or a very structured sales plan, that can be challenging.