E57: Why 80% of the GTM Leaders Are Still Looking Backwards | Meri Kukkonen, Founder, BuildGTM | John Moran, CEO, Prevu Corporation

Imagine coming in on a Monday morning and you, within minutes, got a very clear picture about the true state of your sales pipeline, the true state of individual deals, where the risks lie in those deals, what's been achieved, what's yet to be achieved in those sales cycles, and how probable they are to close. And you're able to kind of visualize your pathway to your target, to your forecast. And you can do that within minutes.

Welcome to UltraTalent GTM Insights. And today I have John Moran, the CEO of Preview AI, and he is taking people from a world of time-consuming complexity into great clarity around forecasting and the revenue insights that they're trying to drive from it. I also have Mary, and Mary is the founder of BuildGTM, and she's the Sherpa leading people into an extremely extremely AI-enabled future. And basically, these are 2 people who've had some excellent conversations with 20+ sales leaders across the APAC, Australia, Europe, UK, and they've really uncovered some really good insights, which you're gonna get an absolute treat as we talk today. And I think some pain points that will resonate. So thank you so much for joining me, John and Mary.

Thanks for having us, Pri.

Thanks for having us. Great to be here.

Fantastic. Well, Mary, do you want to set the canvas by telling us a little bit more about this study and what you uncovered?

We spoke to, earlier this year, to over 20 leaders, CROs, VP sales, head of sales across US, UK, Europe, and Australia. We were heavily focusing on the venture capital and private equity-backed organizations who have that revenue delivery pressure that a lot of us feel in companies. I want to say the median size was between $50 and $250 mil annual recurring revenue. So, what we wanted to do, we really wanted to understand what is hard running a go-to-market team in 2026, 2026. And we asked exactly that, what's hard?

Tell us.

And this was an open peer-to-peer conversation. We weren't looking for any specific answer. What really surprised us was that we did get a closed answer though. Everyone raised the same problem in The first 5 minutes of our conversation. 3 key things came up from these interviews. The first one that still absolutely shocks me is that 0% of revenue leaders rely on CRM alone when it comes to running their day-to-day business, their deals, their pipeline, their forecasting. Every single leader has built a workaround. To understand where their business is at. Now, building on that, they spend between 10 and 20 hours every week in meetings, in one-on-ones, in pipeline meetings. And what very clearly came up is that they are spending this time just reconstructing pipeline reality. They are trying to understand what is going on, they're looking backwards 2 days a week. That's not working on the business. That's just trying to understand where they are at right now. And the third thing that underlines why this is such a big pressure is nearly everyone, I would say 80%, was either in the middle of some kind of transformation, some sort of big transformation within their business. When I say transformation, this is not launching a new product or anything like that. This is either going to a completely different market. Changing their business model, something quite significant that potentially changes and has effects on all parts of their team and the way they operate. And very clearly, when I say one thing came up, the thing that came up, just to underline, nearly half of their week catching up on what's going on still in 2026.

Wow. Okay. I think that it's still staggering that when you talk about 10 to 20 hours, because that's exactly what I hear from people in terms of their core frustrations with their current roles. And this is not just at the CRO level who I spoke to this morning. This is also at level 1 sales managers. It's with accounting executives. It's like the whole organizational bandwidth. 30% to 40% is being consumed in communicating. So, John, tell me a little bit more about what does this really mean in terms of where companies are at and difference between being a fundamentally reactive organization or a reactive leadership structure versus what ought to be the case or is possible.

Yeah, I mean, the implications are huge. So, the first thing is I wish I was surprised, but I'm not because my experience, my personal experience and the conversations I have every week with revenue leaders bear this out, that this is a huge amount of the job. And, you know, it's almost like a badge of honor to be a revenue leader that can keep the status of deals and the conversations they've had around them trapped in their head so that they can recall them at key moments in that communication process. Which seems just insane to me. And it's frustrating to most of those very leaders that that is so much a part of the job and their performance is judged on their ability to sort of do that. All of them, I mean, what's really interesting is that they all called out the problem for themselves. The huge impact that this has is that they're not spending time on the things that they really know will help them improve the performance of the business. And that time, you know, working in the business, coaching on individual deals, just becoming familiar with customer situations, getting face time in front of customers, working on strategy, working on the direction of the organization. All of those things are time-consuming in their own right, but they get crowded out by this huge effort that's occurring constantly on just getting your head around the business. So the biggest impact is that. And the frustration goes through the organization as well. You know, one customer who's sort of broken through this challenge recently. One of their salespeople said something really interesting following a deal review meeting. They said, this is the first time I was so relieved. It's the first time I'm being asked questions about how the company can help me overcome obstacles in my deal and progress the deal forward. I'm so used to having conversations that are about what happened. What did you do? You know, what happened since last week? How did that demo go? Tactical little conversations, just trying to get a handle on things. But now, you know, this conversation has pivoted to one where, you know, we're able to start talking about the strategy and the outcome we want to achieve. And that's what's lost when the leader is spending so much time focused on simply gathering information about what's changed in the business since the last time. they went through the process.

Right. Mary, tell me, what were some of the most standout comments that you heard in terms of typical pain points across these 20 leaders?

I very viscerally remember this one leader who I spoke to, and they're quite a forward-looking organization. I would call mature, and they call themselves mature. And I catch this VP sales, and they say, you caught me in a pretty emotional time. I'm here, sitting here, writing a Slack message to my boss, who will deliver it to the CRO. And if this is the best we've got, we've got a long way to go.

Yeah, that was a really interesting comment that came out in the conversations. And I think it sort of, the other thing that sort of came from comments like that was that there's this sense that a sales leader sort of feels like, am I the one that's missing something here at the picture that's painted is that these leaders are moving forward and driving their business. And that's the story that I hear about other sales leaders. And yet I find myself in this situation where I've, I feel I'm spending so much time just getting my head around my business and what's happened week to week. And that came out really strongly from the conversations that Mary had. And it's an isolating feeling, but the reality is you're in the majority if you are spending all of your time Or not all of your time, you're spending this much of your time investing in gathering information about the state of your pipeline, your deals, and the progress you're making towards your forecast or towards your target, you're in the majority of sales leaders, certainly the huge majority based on the sample size that we had to talk to in this recent research. And so that's, you know, I guess that's a starting point to know that that most companies still haven't quite solved this problem despite the fact we are in 2026. And it seems a strange thing that we've still got this kind of manual analog, very human-driven process that's underpinning everything we're trying to do as a sales leader, both what we are forecasting and also where we're prioritizing our time and focusing our energy. It's underpinned by this really highly manual process. And there certainly is a better way forward.

Yeah. One number that jumped out at me from your report, and I would encourage anyone who's interested in this report to reach out to Mary and John. Basically, it said that 80% of organizations in your survey had recently changed or they are changing their GTM motion. So what that means is that a very large number of people are already being impacted by the onset of the availability of information through AI and LLMs in terms of the GTM motion. And yet it would appear that this, the forecast function and the information gathering still seems to be a combination of manual and intuitive and this whole guesstimation factor that is a huge drag and creates what is very clearly a reactive revenue organization, even as simple as the AE providing information to the leader rather than the leader enabling the AE to go out and win the deal. So the question that I have is that, what does the future look like, John? What are What does good look like in terms of 2 or 3 things that leaders can experience today if they're actually allowed to change that aspect of their roles?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think the first thing I would say is imagine coming in on a Monday morning and you, within minutes, got a very clear picture About the true state of your sales pipeline, the true state of individual deals, where the risks lie in those deals, what's been achieved, what's yet to be achieved in those sales cycles, and how probable they are to close. And you're able to kind of visualize your pathway to your target, to your forecast. And you can do that within minutes. And the reason you can do that is because you've got an underlying system That feeds these signals about your deals, aggregates them at the pipeline level, and just gives you this view. If you have that day one and you can see, in addition to that, everything that has moved or changed across your business since last week, so you can see that incremental movement, so critical for sales leaders to know what's changed. I told this story up the chain of command last week. What's moved since then? What changes have implications for my outlook or for where I need to invest my time this week? So you can see all of that, and that's all information that's served up within the first few minutes of your week rather than taking those first couple of days just to get your head around. To me, so that's the big unlock. Once you've got that, you've got 2 things. Firstly, you've got a huge amount of time freed up to focus on forward-looking activity. And secondly, you've got information that allows you to choose how best to allocate your time. And that's, that for me is the target state that people should be aiming for in this day and age. The technology exists to make this possible. It's not a technology limitation. It's simply that most companies have failed to put this in place, instead choosing to rely on individual talent and hard work at the sales leader level to fill that gap. And if it gets filled, the payoff is everything I just talked through. And I think it's a huge payoff to sales leaders.

Yeah. And I can just see the compounding benefits that would come from, you know, obviously giving them the information that they need pretty much in a matter of minutes, like you mentioned. Mary, I have a question for you. So you are, as I mentioned, a Sherpa, you're kind of leading various stages of startups and scale-ups through this AI GTM adoption route, ensuring that they are aligned. So how should sales leaders, CEOs, CROs think about AI? You know, is it a collection of productivity tools? Is it just a layer or is it a complete operating model shift? What are you seeing out there?

The way I like to start describing AI, when we get to that part of the conversation, it really is something that can transform in a full operational level how your go-to-market team operates. That's not the place to start though. And the way, good way to orient yourself is you probably see this floating around on the internet. There are lots of tests, something along the lines of AI maturity ladder. Or AI health check and these sort of things. And basically, it just helps you orient where you are and where your gaps are and what are the immediate wins. Some structural elements that are important are, of course, your data layer, your semantic layer, and how you're using that. Second part is understanding, actually having someone in your business or working with someone who really understands what AI is good for. And what it's not so good for. It's terrible at nuance. It's very good at high-volume, repetitive tasks, doing at volume, doing at scale, and accelerating that motion, accelerating the speed. But it's not going to handle your key clients' support escalations. That's just not what it's meant for. So, being able to having that internal playbook on really like where to apply and where not, and then creating a really strong point of view on where you're heading. A lot of failure points that I've heard and where customers come to us for is they are really productive. Like, they're getting a lot done, and on paper, it looks like everything is moving forward, and they have so many projects. How's that connecting to your revenue? What is the actual impact on the customer? So keeping that in mind.

Very nicely put. And I think that as a lot of CROs look at that whole, and CEOs look at that whole revenue supply chain, you know, you get marketing and demand generation or growth, you've got Sales, which will take leads and obviously convert them. You've got customer success, and then you've got RevOps. These at least core 4 pillars, the transition from an AI point of view is different in these 4 different functions. Mary, again, what are you seeing in terms of more advanced use cases of some of these applications and tools out there?

The place where some companies already started a few years ago is the AI as a chatbot, you know, the prompt engineering. And when they've been on the journey for a while, and really, to be honest, this does take some time, they moved from that responding to inputs to something a bit— having agents that actually have domain expertise. Within the business, and then those domain expertise, multiple agents working together. And that's really where the leading organizations, most mature organizations are today, when they have internal agentic handover. For example, something that often breaks in a business is that from prospect to customer, that actually having documented and that whole transactional cycle in a way that nothing falls between the cracks, updating appropriate systems. And when we're talking about technology companies, there's actually quite a lot that goes in when we're looking at onboarding customers. So, one of the really key wins for one of my customers has been completely automating that onboarding of a new customer. But don't be fooled. That is a combination of 20 or 25 different workflows that has got them there.

And John, you've, you know, worked in significant leadership roles across the entire gamut, some from very large organizations right through 0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 100. The question I have for you is that if you walked into a $20 to $100 million SaaS company tomorrow. What are the first 3 GTM signals you'd assess to know whether the business is healthy or the business is heading towards trouble?

You like asking big questions, Priya. Obviously, limiting this to 3 is the hard bit, but I would start with the distribution of success. So how Is winning distributed across the organization? How is it distributed evenly across your team? Or is it highly uneven? Do you have lots of low performers that are being carried by a handful of high performers? It talks to scalability. It talks, you know, talking about have you graduated from sort of individual hero efforts into a truly scalable GTM operation? And the same's true over time. Do you have, is there high lumpiness from quarter 1 to quarter 2 to quarter 3? Or is that line smoothing to show that you've kind of scaled the business and there's a repeatability which is playing out in the numbers? So, I think the distribution of success is one of the first indicators. The second thing is probably a little bit harder to— takes a bit more time to uncover, and that is where are we creating value in our GTM, in our go-to-market motion? Where do we create value for the customer in that? And for me, that's one of the big things that's changed in the market in the last certainly decade, if not even more recent than that, this acceleration of just options available to customers. The customer has this just almost insane, mind-boggling number of choices that they can make to solve any given problem in their organization. So, your value creation can't be left to what happens after the sale's done. You have to be creating value out of the gate or you just will get lost in the noise. And so, the whole go-to-market motion needs to be built around this idea that we create value for our customers. We do it from the first conversation we have with them and here's how we do it and here's how that value is unique to us and differentiated. So, I think just looking for that is key because without that, it's going to be increasingly hard to sort of scale if that's not well understood across the sales team. And the third piece is what is the customer saying? So, what's the voice of the customer really? How are we perceived? What are our customers where we won business telling us about why we won? What are the customers where we've not won business telling us why we didn't win? How much knowledge do we have of that? If I can learn those 3 things, I think I'm well on the way to understanding where our customer's at. Where the company is at, but also where I could focus my attention to lift the performance of the business.

The way you've just described it is incredible because you're absolutely right, especially starting with the distribution of success. I think that people have a get-by quarter-by-quarter mentality, and as long as the job gets done, nobody asks too many questions. But In reality, if you were to move from being a reactive function where you are living based on yesterday's conversation, rather than actually taking into a proactive revenue organization by actually looking at what is working and multiplying that and using the collective power of AI and the systems that you build to make you smarter, I think that that's really where A lot of, especially in that, you know, $5 to $50 million ARR, you know, these companies are really often operating between quarter to quarter. And I think that that's really where there can be some very significant change. Mary, I have a question for you and one more for John, and then we'll wrap up. But what is the, how would you differentiate a modern CRO or a VP of sales in the context of startups and scale-ups? Versus someone who has grown up in a different era.

Nice. I need to take a minute to think about that. Stumped.

I, um, you've been doing this too long, Priya. You've worked out some curly, curly questions.

I will.

I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to give you an example. To this, because this has been on my mind, Priya, since you mentioned on— it really stuck with me when you said like, what are they missing? Like, what are they missing when that 2 days is used on catching up? And for context, I spoke to one of the regional APAC leaders of one of the 3 top SaaS companies in the world right now. Super privileged to pick that person's brain. And I'll tell you how they build it. And this is the modern CRO versus, I want to say, a legacy CRO. They build it from the ground up, looking at where's value created. And this regional leader said to me, look, Mary, I haven't, I don't think I've been in a forecast meeting in the last 2 years.

Wow.

The data is there. It's the starting point. And it's not that this person doesn't have challenges. It's not that this work is not stressful, but what they're focusing on is winning market share. They're focusing on where's the customer value created. They're focusing on how do we stay as the number one In our vertical, what is the pipeline of development in terms of our skills, in terms of competition, in terms of product, how well our product knows what really matters to our clients. Those are the things that they're focusing on and not this keeping up appearances and telling stories about what's going to close.

Hmm.

Thank you.

That's really good. John, what is the cost of holding on to processes or leaders that have worked for you, but not making big, bold decisions to actually change? Because a lot of people, I know lots of organizations that are happy with the status quo because it's hard to change.

Yeah, look, it is hard to change. It's the boiling frog analogy, right? Change like this, change in the market, it's not something you see in a day or in a week or in a month, but happens steadily over time. And by the time you sort of realize it's impacting your business, the opportunity to change is long past and you're playing catch-up. And so that's the cost. The cost is that, that you can't see the problem yet because it's not appearing in the numbers, but the indications are there and you wait. And so you miss the opportunity, competitors come in, market shifts, you're not there where the new market sits. So I do think there's a change imperative now. Look, we spoke to 20 leaders. There were 20 leaders who described constant change. So many leaders have grasped this idea that they need to be moving constantly as the market shifts and moves. But we need to be really creative about where we invest in that change. I mean, what Mary just described, I've never worked in a job where I would describe my job the way that leader described their job, where they spent almost no time, you know, looking at what happened this week and what the impacts are on their forecast. And they spend all of their time on that forward-looking strategic work. Which has got its own challenges and difficulties. But that's absolutely where we should be starting. The interesting thing to me, you talked before about sort of the value in these processes. Mary touched on it too. There's a huge amount of value in that process that takes most leaders 1 to 2 days of their week. There's value in it because it's a necessary part of the business. The problem is, should, you know, Not the problem. The opportunity is if that was instead automated and could just unlock this forward-looking capacity of a sales leader, then I think they would have the time to spend thinking about the business. What needs to shift? What needs to move? I can see what's going on this year. How should we be structured next year to take advantage of the opportunities in the market? Where Are my team underperforming? What needs to change in order to lift that performance? Are there personnel changes or an enablement issue? All of those things take cognitive capacity and time. They're complex things to work through. And the time pressure that most leaders feel means they spend way too little time focused on those things. And so, I think that's a huge reason why this change doesn't happen because They're in yesterday. Their head's in yesterday, not in tomorrow. And what an amazing thing, the leader that Mary described, what an amazing thing it would be to spend 99% of your time thinking about what's next, what's going to happen tomorrow, what needs to happen, rather than looking backwards.

Fantastic. I mean, I could I could ask you question after question, but I think that in the context of what you've established, both of you today, is that even though companies say that 80% of their GTM motion has changed, 80 or 90% are still stuck in how forecasting and interpreting data was done to feed up the chain rather than going forward. And I I want to close with this thought, which impacted me very early on in my career. As the first-time sales manager, I read this book called Only the Paranoid Survive, and this was by Andy Grove, CEO of Intel.

I've not read it.

The one thing that remains, there's lots of wonderful things, but one thing, and it says that the job of a leader is to actually be looking where others haven't gone yet. And that is to look ahead, to be assessing the threat levels of what each path takes, and being the one who's continuously clearing the way to a better future. And so anyone who's listening, if you want to create a better future, I'd ask you to reach out to Mary, reach out to John. I think there's incredible value that they would add in terms of not only the research, but what they're actually helping companies adopt. And guaranteed, it will—

Thank you.

help you not only survive, but also thrive in the rapid-changing industry. Because I'm out there talking to AI companies every week, and I can tell you it is dramatically changing, and it's going to happen faster than anything that we've known. So thank you so much, John. Thank you, Mary. This was a fantastic conversation, and I appreciate you so much for coming on and sharing this.

Thanks, Pri. Really appreciate you having us.

Thanks, Priyit. See you next time.

All right then. Bye-bye.