Jeanne DeWitt Grosser: How one GTM engineer replaced 10 SDRs

Jeanne defines GTM as every function that touches a customer or drives revenue—marketing, sales, CS, support, partnerships—and argues you should map and orchestrate the entire lifecycle (awareness to multi-year retention) like a product experience, optimizing each touchpoint to feel valuable and distinctive, not transactional.

At Vercel, “go-to-market engineers” shadow top performers, then turn repeatable workflows into agents that handle tasks like lead qualification, research, and first-touch emails—with humans in the loop. In six weeks, one engineer built an inbound lead agent that let them go from 10 SDRs to 1 on that workflow while maintaining conversion rates and improving speed.

By running agents over Gong transcripts, emails, and Slack threads, Vercel discovered that deals labeled as “lost on price” were actually lost due to failing to engage economic buyers or convincingly communicate ROI. They now use a real-time “Deal Bot” to flag issues mid-cycle, and they treat poor sales motions as “bugs” to fix in weekly GTM sprints.

Both at Stripe and Vercel, Jeanne builds segmentation using empirically predictive attributes such as company size, growth potential, traffic (via CrUX), and business model or workload type. This informs who to target, what to sell them, and how complex the sales motion should be, and serves as a shared language across product, data, and GTM.

Jeanne’s litmus test is that an AE should be indistinguishable from a PM for 10 minutes in front of engineers. She expects sales to act as an R&D extension—distilling patterns from customer conversations, filtering noise from signal, and feeding high-quality, roadmap-relevant insights back to product and engineering.