GTM 121: Listening to Your Customers Without Obeying with Crunchbase’s CRO Neal Patel

Nealesh Patel is the CRO at Crunchbase, a leading platform for private company intelligence. With over 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Neal has a proven track record of executing progressive growth strategies, landing innovative partnerships, developing revenue streams, and building winning teams. As the leader of Crunchbase’s go-to-market functions (Strategic Partnerships, Sales, BD, Marketing, Customer Success/Experience, Revenue Operations), as well as the de facto general manager of its data licensing business, Neal has a cross-functional and holistic understanding of how to provide value to customers, generate revenue, and accelerate growth. Under his leadership, Crunchbase has more than 4X’d its unique users, increased its annual recurring revenue by over 75x, and secured partnerships with large brands like S&P, LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Monday.com, Perplexity, G2, Factset, Amazon, and Snowflake. Neal is also an active board member, advisor, and investor in several high-growth startups, where he leverages his expertise and network to help them scale and succeed.

Discussed in this Episode:

  • The importance of listening to customers without blindly obeying their requests
  • How Crunchbase adapted to the rise of ChatGPT and generative AI
  • The value of conducting ongoing customer tours to inform product development and strategy
  • Insights on career growth and taking risks in professional development
  • The future of sales management in the age of AI and rev tech platforms

Highlights:

(03:45) The concept of “listening to customers without obeying”
(09:12) Crunchbase’s response to the release of ChatGPT
(13:58) Developing predictive signals using Crunchbase’s proprietary data
(19:32) Career advice: The importance of curiosity and authenticity
(22:15) Taking risks and daring to be “stupid” in your career
(25:37) The ongoing need for human sales managers in the age of AI
(30:42) Why traditional sales playbooks may become obsolete
(34:21) Institutionalizing customer tours as a core business practice
(37:55) One thing revenue leaders believe to be true that Neal thinks is bull$***
(39:47) One thing that is working for Neal in go-to-market right now

Guest Speaker Links (Neal Patel):
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealeshpatel/

Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/
Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/

Sponsors:

  • Apollo. The revenue tech stack is messy right now. All the leaders that I’m talking to are reevaluating their stacks from the ground up. Do we really need ten different solutions? If you are one of those leaders, I would recommend that you take a look at Apollo. Maybe you think you know Apollo, maybe you’ve taken a look at them in the past but I’ve looked under the hood recently and if your goal is to reduce and simplify your tech stack AND have best in breed data layered in with AI – they would be at the top of our list. There’s a reason Rippling and Stripe switched over. We worked with their team to create an interactive demo page – you can check it out at: https://www.apollo.io/gtm 

The GTM Podcast
Features conversations with the top 1% of tech executives, VCs, and founders – the experts who have ‘been there, done that’ to build some of the fastest-growing software companies. Every week, a guest joins Scott Barker to dissect their stories – revealing what worked, what didn’t, and how things actually went down.

Before helping found GTMfund, Scott spent 4 years at Outreach as Director of Strategic Engagement. He was in charge of aligning key relationships with VCs, BoDs, ecosystem partners and community members to drive revenue and strategic initiatives across Outreach. Scott initially ran revenue/partnerships for Sales Hacker (which was acquired by Outreach in 2018). Prior to Sales Hacker, he led and built outbound Business Development teams at Payfirma and MediaValet. Scott also advises for a number of high growth start-ups and is the host/author of The GTM Podcast and The GTM Newsletter. At GTMfund, Scott leads all fundraising efforts and runs the media arm of the firm. He’s also responsible for assessing investments, team management, LP/community relationships and GTM support for founders.

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