1. Your GTM Motion is a Product That Needs Continuous Iteration
Most revenue organizations operate like they're running a factory assembly line. Sales does A, marketing does B, customer success does C. Rinse and repeat. It's process thinking in a world that demands product thinking.
Sangeeta learned this lesson out of necessity at Miro, a best-in-class product-led growth company. "I felt like if I didn't really understand how product is built, I could not be a relevant partner to the organization," she told me. This forced her to study product management principles and apply them to her revenue organization. This experience very closely mirrors my experience at Shopify.
The difference is profound. Traditional GTM is a straight line process with a clear beginning and end. Product-thinking GTM is a continuous loop of hypothesis, experimentation, learning, and optimization, which is exactly how the best product teams operate.
Consider how product teams approach feature development: they start with user research, form hypotheses about value creation, build MVPs, test with select users, gather feedback, iterate, and then scale what works. Revenue teams should operate identically and Sangeeta built an incredibly novel approach to doing so.
"The best organizations are the best learning organizations," Sangeeta explained. "You're actually in a loop. It's a circular loop of never-ending learning circles."
This requires a fundamental mindset shift from "I have a playbook" to "I'm constantly discovering what playbook works for our business." Research from Teresa Torres on opportunity solution trees provides an excellent framework for this discovery process, helping teams identify root causes rather than just symptoms.
2. Experimentation Beats Best Practices Every Time
Here's where things get uncomfortable for most revenue leaders: you have to embrace not knowing the answer. Sangeeta's team at Miro ran 4-5 major experiments simultaneously, each designed to test critical assumptions about their GTM motion.
They created dedicated "pods"(small teams of reps, BDRs, SEs, and renewal managers) who would test everything from sales plays to competitive positioning to pricing strategies. These weren't side projects; they were serious experiments with dedicated resources and weekly inspection rhythms and they were run by a PM within Rev Ops.
"We assigned somebody from the revenue operations team to be the product manager of this process," Sangeeta shared. This person wasn't a project manager checking boxes; they were continuously turning dials and optimizing for better outcomes.
One example: instead of competing on features and functions (the typical approach), they experimented with positioning themselves as solving a fundamentally different problem than competitors. "We solve a different problem. We are just doing a very different job for you," became their winning competitive frame. This only emerged through testing, not through conference room theorizing.
The key insight: stop scaling things until you know they work. "You can't scale a 600-person organization without knowing exactly what is going to work," Sangeeta noted. "It's going to be a very expensive mistake if you get it wrong."
3. Kill the Term "Post-Sales" Before It Kills Your Business
This might be the most important insight for SaaS leaders. Sangeeta has made it her mission to "eradicate the post-sales term" because it represents fundamentally flawed thinking about customer relationships.
"Post-sales" dates back to the 1980s when companies sold perpetual software. You sold once, collected support fees annually, and that was it. But SaaS changed everything. "SaaS said, well, now the customer has the power to decide, am I going to keep it every year or every month they make a decision," Sangeeta explained.
Yet we've carried forward this antiquated mental model. We still think there's a moment when "selling" stops and something else begins. "You're never done selling," Sangeeta argued. "When are you done selling? You are continuously selling this customer. What are you selling now? You're either selling more value or you're selling the existing value and making sure they keep you for the foreseeable future."
Research from Bain & Company shows that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25-95%. Yet most organizations treat the post-signature experience as an afterthought managed by people who explicitly aren't supposed to "sell."
The psychological principle of loss aversion, first identified by Kahneman and Tversky, explains why this matters so much. Customers don't just evaluate what they're gaining from your solution, they're constantly evaluating what they might lose by switching away. If your "post-sales" team isn't equipped to reinforce value and drive expansion, you're fighting loss aversion with one hand tied behind your back.
4. CS Leaders Can Become Great CROs but Only if They’ve Carried a Number
This insight challenges conventional wisdom about revenue leadership paths. Most people assume CROs must come from traditional sales backgrounds, but Sangeeta's journey from account management and expansion to CRO reveals a different path.
The key insight: customer success professionals often have deeper customer empathy and value delivery experience than traditional sales leaders. They understand the entire customer lifecycle, not just the moment of initial purchase. "Most post sales, again, think about their world starting in stage four or depending on the companies, sort of the stage of evaluation at best," Sangeeta observed. "But the best CS people are going to understand the entire journey."
However, the transition requires developing specific competencies:
Commercial Acumen: You must learn to have "value exchange conversations" and become comfortable with negotiation. Force Management provides excellent training in this area.
Business Understanding: Master financial planning and understand how your entire revenue model works. As Sangeeta put it: "If you are the owner of the number and you have been given a number based on a set of assumptions that are in that complicated sheet, you really would be best served understanding every one of those assumptions."
Systematic Thinking: Move beyond individual account management to building scalable systems and processes.
The transition from VP to CRO requires an additional leap: "The minute you've got a C title on you, you are now a company leader. And so you have to stop thinking as a functional leader alone and say, I'm going to think company leadership."
5. Diligence Your Next Role Like a VC
Sangeeta's current job search approach offers a masterclass in executive evaluation. After taking an intentional sabbatical, she approached her search like a VC who is going to write an entire fund into one cheque, because that's essentially what you're doing with your career.
Her prioritization framework:
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Market first: "I can't deliver the outcome if the market is a limited market. I personally don't know how I'm going to go make that market a bigger market."
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Team and product: Nearly equal priority, with team slightly ahead for early-stage companies where great teams build great products.
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Mission alignment: Specifically seeking companies that "multiply value for somebody else" rather than just solving internal problems.
Her due diligence process was remarkably thorough:
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Attending company kickoffs to observe customer interactions
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Reviewing multiple quarters of board decks under NDA
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Conducting workshop-style interviews to observe collaboration patterns
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Talking to 30+ investors across different geographies
The key insight: most executives don't diligence potential employers nearly enough. They get excited about titles, compensation, or company brands without understanding the fundamental business dynamics they're signing up for.
One non-negotiable: full financial transparency. "If you have an NDA that is protecting them, I would be worried if they're super protective about what they have." If a company won't share their complete financial picture with a potential CRO, that's a massive red flag.
The Path Forward
These insights represent a fundamental shift from industrial-age thinking to information-age thinking about revenue strategy. We're moving from linear processes to adaptive systems, from best practices to experimentation, from functional silos to integrated customer journeys.
Especially in a post-AI age, the companies and leaders that make this transition will have an unfair advantage. While their competitors are still running 2005 playbooks, they'll be continuously learning and optimizing like the best product teams in the world.
Start with one experiment. Pick a hypothesis about your GTM motion that you're not certain about. Create a small pod to test it. Measure the results. Learn from what doesn't work. Scale what does.
Your future self, and your customers, will thank you.
Further Reading
Frameworks & Resources:
