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The GTMnow Podcast

The GTMnow Podcast

Written by: GTMnow
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The GTMnow Podcast interviews well-known tech executive, VC, and founders - the expert operators in the trenches who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Sophie Buonassisi to dissect their stories, revealing expert insights around what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.

This podcast is produced by GTMnow, the media brand of GTMfund - sharing insight on go-to-market from working with hundreds of portfolio companies backed by over 350 of the best go-to-market executives. GTMfund is an early-stage VC fund focused on investing in the most exciting, up-and-coming B2B SaaS companies across the world. The LP network consists of VP and C-level Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders from companies like DocuSign, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and many more.

Visit gtmnow.com for more details and to sign up for our newsletter and other content resources.

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Episodes
  • Inside LinkedIn: buyer behavior, how to social sell, why warm intros get 3x the response, why only 45% of sellers are seen as trustworthy and the 4 behaviors that separate top sellers | Catherine Flynn (LinkedIn Sales Navigator)

    Inside LinkedIn: buyer behavior, how to social sell, why warm intros get 3x the response, why only 45% of sellers are seen as trustworthy and the 4 behaviors that separate top sellers | Catherine Flynn (LinkedIn Sales Navigator)
    Sep 23 2026

    Information has never been more abundant, and trust has never been harder to earn. That's the tension at the heart of LinkedIn's new research, "The Trust Advantage," and Catherine, who leads marketing for LinkedIn's Sales Solutions business (Sales Navigator), joins Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow to unpack it. The headline gap: 86% of B2B buyers say expertise is what builds trust, but only 45% describe the sellers they meet as trustworthy.

    Catherine has spent 25+ years in marketing, including 13 at Meta, and now runs a global team out of Singapore. She argues AI has made "spray and pray" easier than ever, which is exactly why the winning move is doing less, more relevant outreach. She breaks down the four behaviors that separate top sellers, why warm introductions convert so much better, what a seller's LinkedIn profile should actually say, and how putting your expertise out publicly now helps both you and your company rank in AI search.

    What you'll learn:
    - The trust gap: why 86% of buyers want expertise but only 45% find sellers trustworthy, and how to close it
    - Why expertise in a first conversation means leading with their problem, not your product
    - The case for less outreach: more signal means you can be far more selective
    - The four top-seller behaviors: signal-based selling, early multithreading, timely engagement (hours not weeks), and genuinely personalized outreach
    - Why warm intros win: ~3x higher email response and ~2x higher connection-acceptance than cold
    - The most underrated entry point: executive sponsors and former customers who moved companies
    - What a seller's LinkedIn profile should be (a point of view, not a resume), and why profile views are a top buying signal
    - The algorithm and discoverability: how posting even once a week, and engaging on others' posts, compounds
    - Why LinkedIn is now the most-cited domain for professional queries in AI search, and what that means for you
    - Hiring in the AI era: adaptability and generalists over specialists, and "throw your hat over the wall"

    Connect with Catherine:
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherineflynn/

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

    About the guest: Catherine leads marketing for LinkedIn's Sales Solutions business, home of Sales Navigator. She has 25+ years in marketing, including consumer and agency roots and roughly 13 years at Meta/Facebook, and is based in Singapore, where much of the Sales Solutions business is being built across APAC.

    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.

    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
  • Why More AI Won't Grow Your Revenue (and What Will) | Loreal Lynch (CMO, Nooks)

    Why More AI Won't Grow Your Revenue (and What Will) | Loreal Lynch (CMO, Nooks)
    Sep 15 2026

    The CMO of Nooks (and former CMO of Jasper) joins GTMnow to explain why buying more agents won't grow revenue unless you rebuild the process underneath, and what the human-plus-agent revenue team truly looks like.

    Loreal has had a front-row seat to two AI waves: first at Jasper, where AI reshaped marketing content, and now at Nooks, building toward what she calls the revenue agents category. She breaks down why the tools in today's GTM stack were built for humans to click through, not for agents to execute; why the org chart and the process both have to be rethought from the ground up; and why the real shift isn't reps prompting AI, but AI prompting reps. She also gets into the misconception that agents are easy to build, the CMO-CRO alignment model she runs with her counterpart Hannah, and why the marketing pendulum is swinging back from pure performance to brand.

    What you'll learn:
    - Why bolting AI tools onto pre-AI processes fails, and what a real revenue operating system requires
    - The iceberg model of human vs. agent work, and why the waterline keeps rising
    - Why the future flips: AI stops waiting for prompts and starts prompting the rep
    - Augmentation over replacement: if an agent makes a rep 10x, you hire more reps, not fewer
    - The results some teams see: ~3x meetings booked and ~2x pipeline on the same headcount
    - Why "agents are easy to build" is a trap once you need shared data, governance, and calling/email infrastructure at scale
    - What stays human: judgment, narrative, and reading the room (the surf-small-talk story)
    - The CMO-CRO alignment model: shared pipeline goals instead of fighting over sourced-lead credit
    - Why marketing's pendulum is swinging back from performance to brand in the AI era
    - Why starting with a wedge (the dialer) and its conversational data beats selling a broad platform

    Chapters:
    00:00 Cold open: augmentation not replacement, and AI that prompts the rep
    01:14 Welcome, and why she left Jasper's AI wave for Nooks
    03:26 Seeing AI from every side: customer, board, now operator
    04:27 The iceberg: human work above the water, agent work below
    05:13 What humans do best vs. what agents do best
    07:14 The real question isn't how many agents, it's who prompts whom
    07:31 Augmentation over replacement: make a rep 10x, hire more
    08:37 The results some teams see, and what's next
    09:56 Why bolting AI onto old processes fails|12:06 The misconception that agents are easy to build
    13:58 Going AI-native inside her own marketing org
    15:10 The framework for what goes to headcount vs. agents
    16:19 What stays human: judgment, context, and the naming story
    17:32 CMO-CRO alignment: shared systems and shared metrics
    19:43 How she and her CRO run pipeline without sourced-lead targets
    21:40 What's changed, and what still works: the pendulum back to brand
    23:42 What she's excited to build at Nooks
    25:10 Who's winning with Nooks: the AI-native early adopters
    27:06 Rapid fire: leadership, impact over activity, no time for bad wine
    28:25 Who Nooks is hiring, and where to find Loreal

    Connect with Loreal Lynch:
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorealesque/

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

    About the guest: Loreal Lynch is the Chief Marketing Officer of Nooks, a revenue agents platform that started with an AI dialer and expanded across the sales engagement stack. She was previously CMO of Jasper, and earlier held marketing leadership roles at Salesforce, Tableau, and Stripe. Nooks' customers include Cursor, Replicate, Deel, and HubSpot.

    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.

    Show More Show Less
    29 mins
  • Building an AI-Era Sales Machine | Chris McDonough (VP Sales, Campfire)

    Building an AI-Era Sales Machine | Chris McDonough (VP Sales, Campfire)
    Sep 10 2026
    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 likeWhy 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 employWhat he hires for now: not just skill, but whether you can self-learn from AI on day oneHow 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 moreWhy he leaves once a company is big enough to run Workday, and goes back downmarketHow to sell into the "real economy," where nobody cares about your hot VC and references are hyper-localRegrettable churn: the retention metric behind Samsara's run, and why top reps compoundOne-way vs. two-way doors: how to make fast decisions at 70-80% of the dataChapters:00:00 Intro01:17 Welcome, and a career of joining companies right before they explode01:51 Employee 40 at Motive, and the two-week decision that changed everything04:19 The federal mandate, and the hiring class that got promoted in 30 days05:33 Why career growth is tied to company growth rate07:12 The mandate story: from selling nothing to 70 demos a week10:19 Was it the wrong decision? Believing through the objection10:56 What 800-900 demos in 3 months does to a seller12:11 Samsara: scaling an office 0 to 100, and 250 interviews in 90 days13:42 The contrarian hiring philosophy: the 10x seller and the widening gap15:59 Why he left Verkada for Campfire, and the "Workday rule"18:41 Building an AI-native sales org with no tech debt21:14 What Campfire is: AI-native ERP and one of software's last moats25:25 Expanding the TAM and the recession-proof case26:12 Selling into the real economy: hyper-local references, not hot logos28:26 His honest take on AI outbound and AI SDRs30:49 The SDR org as your existential talent bench31:56 The metric he obsesses over: regrettable churn33:45 Who Campfire is hiring, and "will Claude kill this company?"35:33 Rapid fire: leadership, execution over competitors, one-way vs. two-way doors40:19 Where to find Chris, and how to actually DM your way into a jobConnect with Chris McDonough:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mcdonough-94546626/Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnowLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/ X: https://x.com/sophiebuonaAbout 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 Verkada, 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_nowThe 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.
    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
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