GTM 162: From PLG to Enterprise: How to Layer Sales Without Breaking What Works | Ghazi Masood

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Ghazi Masood is the Chief Revenue Officer at Retool, where he leads the go-to-market engine for the low-code developer platform. Previously he served as SVP & GM, Americas at Auth0 after leadership roles at Microsoft, Oracle, Polycom, and Nintex K2, and he advises several high-growth startups on GTM. A field-first operator, Ghazi specializes in layering sales onto product-led motions and building enterprise upgrade paths without breaking self-serve growth.

Discussed in this episode

The moment inbound stops being enough—and how to size the outbound gap
Why to bifurcate SDRs (inbound vs. outbound) and how to define lead sources
Profiling inbound (more technical, SE-adjacent) vs. outbound (AE-track) talent
Structuring self-serve as a permanent home vs. a stepping stone to enterprise
“Ungate to upgrade”: using sustained overage/feature use as a right-sizing trigger
Pricing & packaging that pulls larger accounts to annual, committed plans
The “GTM engineer” model for AI-native, high-velocity companies
Hiring pace, capacity planning, and the leadership principles that scale

Episode highlights

00:00 — Inbound eventually caps out; annual planning exposes the pipeline gap that outbound must fill.

00:45 — What it really takes to add sales to a product-led motion—without breaking PLG.

03:23 — First move: bifurcate SDR into dedicated inbound and outbound to drive focus and outcomes.

04:18 — Nail definitions with Marketing: what counts as inbound vs. outbound (e.g., events ≠ inbound).

06:37 — Decide the role of self-serve: permanent home for some segments vs. stepping stone to enterprise.

09:41 — Ungated features as signals: after ~3 months of sustained overage/premium use, “right-size” the plan.

12:09 — Why frictionless adoption beats hard gates—and how clear web docs make the convo non-adversarial.

15:10 — When to move from pay-as-you-go to annual: sophistication and committed usage, not arbitrary timing.

18:51 — Enter the “GTM engineer”: one person spans SDR → SE → AE → AM to capture massive inbound demand.

25:36 — Frameworks that still work: MEDD(P)ICC and Solution Selling 2.0 for complex, multi-product deals.

Key takeaways

Shrink gates to grow adoption.
Ungating premium capabilities can accelerate product value realization; the enforcement happens later with right-sizing conversations anchored in usage data.
Bifurcate SDRs earlier than you think.
Dedicated inbound vs. outbound reps sharpen behaviors, speed SLAs, and lift conversion—shared queues blur priorities and stall pipeline.
Define “what self-serve is for.”
If self-serve is a permanent home for a segment, price and package accordingly; if it’s a stepping stone, design upgrade thresholds and signals intentionally.
Measure sustained overage, not moments.
Three months of consistent feature use or MEU overages is a cleaner, more customer-friendly trigger than pop-ups and hard blocks.
Staff to demand, not aspiration.
Headcount follows proven pipeline math; throwing bodies at the funnel before validating capacity and coverage drives inefficiency and churn.
Technical empathy wins inbound.
Inbound SDRs in PLG often trend SE-adjacent—optimize for product fluency, not pure “cold-call energy.”
Price pages are part of sales.
Clear, public plan definitions do the pre-qualification for you—less debate, faster right-sizing.
Annuals are an outcome, not a lever.
As sophistication rises (users, security features, scale), annual commitments become obvious; discounting is a nudge, not the strategy.
AI-native GTM looks different.
Where virality fuels $100M+ without AEs, a “GTM engineer” model captures inbound efficiently before you specialize later.
Keep it fun—and accountable.
“Win together, lose together” cultures shorten feedback loops and make the grind sustainable.

Sponsor – Pursuit

The best talent isn’t actively job hunting. Pursuit helps companies hire elite go-to-market talent on a non-retainer basis. As a key GTMfund partner, they equip sales and marketing teams with top performers.

If you’re hiring for sales or marketing roles, reach out to Pursuit at pursuitsalessolutions.com/gtm or message a GTMfund team member.

Recommended books

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni — A practical lens for leadership team dynamics and operating cadence.
Good to Great by Jim Collins — Classic strategy heuristics that still inform disciplined growth bets.

GTM 162 Episode Transcript

Ghazi Masood: 0:00

As businesses grow and evolve, we’ll come to a point and say, hey, inbound is just not going to be enough, we need to go supplement inbound. Without bound. We would not gate anything. We would basically allow customers to use anything they actually wanted. But we clearly had definitions and documentation. If there’s like three months of use of something they’re not licensed for, they’re probably going to get a call from someone in sales to kind of right-size them into the plan.

Sophie Buonassisi: 0:45

This episode breaks down what it takes to layer sales onto a product-led motion to win. Ghazi Masood, who helped scale Auth0 and Retool, shares lessons from companies that grew from self-serve to sales-assisted. You’ll learn how to build a hybrid motion that works without breaking what’s working, when to bifurcate your SDR team, and how to design pricing and packaging that drives enterprise upgrades. If you’re navigating the shift from PLG product-led growth to hybrid sales, this episode is a tactical blueprint. All right, let’s get into it, Ghazi welcome to the podcast.

Ghazi Masood: 1:15

Thank you, Sophie, good to see you.

Sophie Buonassisi: 1:16

Great to see you too, and I want to dive right in because you’ve seen two breakout companies go from self-serve growth to adding sales. What were the earliest signs that it was time to make that shift?

Ghazi Masood: 1:29

Yeah, no, super, super interesting. Yeah, I’ve been at a lot of different companies out there and most recently a lot of PLG companies that kind of gravitate and kind of go through this problem and question. And you know like my thought process on this is, as businesses grow and evolve, companies usually get to a point where you have to figure out that you need to supplement pipeline and you can no longer just rely on inbound pipeline to satisfy your overall pipeline needs. And this kind of just makes the case for outbound and SLG more prevalent and it becomes even more apparent as you do like annual planning and really really determine which our ARR needs are, You’ll come to a point and say, hey, inbound is just not going to be enough, we need to go supplement inbound without bound.

Sophie Buonassisi: 2:10

Makes sense and for you yourself you’ve worn those shoes At Auth0, at Retool how did you convince the team that it was time to change course?

Ghazi Masood: 2:20

Yeah, I mean, usually there’s not really a whole lot of convincing to do. It becomes pretty apparent and obvious that we need to bring more pipeline into the business to support the ARR needs, right? You know, as everyone knows, when you get into an annual planning process you determine and set the growth rate of what you want to grow by whether it’s 30, 40% or north of that and you kind of do the top down and the bottoms up plan and as part of that process you’ll come to a point where you’ll see that inbound is just not going to be enough. So there really isn’t a whole lot of convincing to do. It just kind of makes things more apparent and you kind of go out and embark on that journey.

Sophie Buonassisi: 2:58

And the state that we find most companies are in is they’ve always got their eyes on SLG. Like you said, it is a little bit more obvious, but it’s also the path to enterprise, to bigger contracts, larger ACVs. So it is usually something that is desired. But let’s say a company is making that transition, everyone’s on board. You have a need to convince them. They’re already on board. What’s the first thing that you change in your go-to-market motion?

Ghazi Masood: 3:23

Yeah. So kind of just going back to my history at Auth0 and Retool, you know. So the first thing we did so initially, when companies are small and you have an SDR team, you usually have hybrid individuals where you have SDRs that do both inbound and outbound, and that’s usually sufficient for a period of time. But when you really really want to start doubling down and start driving towards a focused approach, the first thing we did is we bifurcated our SVR team and we basically had inbound dedicated folks and then folks who would be dedicated to outbound. We found over time that you know, you just need the focus. You just need the focus and have a dedication there, just so people can actually focus on the right things and drive the right behaviors and drive the right outcomes. So that was the very first thing we did, is we bifurcated the SDR team to Inbound and Outbound.

Sophie Buonassisi: 4:11

Interesting, okay. And were there any lessons or challenges to that bifurcation process?

Ghazi Masood: 4:18

I think the first thing is I think there’s a couple of things. One is you have to kind of define this one Lance of what really are lead sources that are inbound and what really are lead sources that are outbound. An example of that could be like event leads right, are event leads inbound or outbound? I would say like event leads are outbound because usually an event lead is somebody who comes to your booth or you engage with at a conference, but you have to follow up with them to determine if there’s interest, if there’s appetite to kind of move forward there. And again, other companies do this differently. So the first thing to do is to get good alignment with marketing and the sales org around the definition of what inbound means from a channel perspective and what outbound means from an outbound channel perspective. That’s the first thing. The second is, I think, as you bifurcate the team and you have dedicated reps for inbound and outbound, you have to determine the profile of these individuals right.

Ghazi Masood: 5:15

And this is especially important in like a PLG company, because early on in PLG usually folks who are inbound tend to have a technical hat on because they’re helping the customer with a signup flow, they’re demoing the product, they need to understand the product kind of inside and out. So usually the inbound team early on tends to be a bit more technical in nature and their career path is really kind of gravitating and becoming more of like an SE. They don’t really want to go into sales. Outbound profiles, as you know, are different right Like outbound sellers and outbound BDR teams come from really more of a sales mindset where it’s all about pipeline generation and they have a vested interest in that pipeline actually closing the revenue. And most of the outbound folks eventually want to kind of make and move their career into being an account executive. So really really determining the profile of where you get these people and where they come from and what their career aspirations are, I think is also super, super important.

Sophie Buonassisi: 6:14

Excellent point. And I’m curious. You know, at Auth0, self-serve onboarding served as a stepping stone and then, with Retool, some customers stayed in self-serve forever. Right, some customers are happy to stay in self-serve forever, while others need a sales touch to really grow. How do you design a go-to-market model that can win at both?

Ghazi Masood: 6:37

Yeah, yeah, this is a really, really good question. Ultimately, I think what needs to happen first is you need to define the role of self-service in your business, and every business will have a different role or function as to what they want self-service to go out and do. I think you also want to define how customers want to engage with you and your product and then, depending on this, you can kind of figure out what signals you want to get from those self-service customers to figure out where they are on their journey. So, as an example, right, if you know self-service customers kind of come in and you know that they want to just get onboarded onto your technology and your solution, you want to have a platform and a vehicle for them to do that in a very seamless way. But maybe you reserve the right for some of these enterprise features like single sign-on and source control to more sophisticated customers, right. So when they actually get to those thresholds, they know they have to kind of gravitate out of self-service into kind of what we call an enterprise or a committed plan. But again, to determine that, you have to kind of figure out the role of self-service and there’s a lot of work that organizations do and we did at Auth0 and Retool to kind of figure out like hey, what segment of customers and size of customers are engaging and coming in from self-service? Are they startups, are they mom-and-pop shops? Are they smaller entities? Are they ever going to need the sophistication of what our enterprise plan needs?

Ghazi Masood: 7:57

So at OddZero, as an example, we knew that it didn’t really matter. We basically wanted to give the customers access to the platform and know that over time they will need more sophistication and they’ll gravitate there. So at Odd Zero it was clearly a stepping stone and a lot of our mid-size and small business customers started off on self-service. But over time I would say like less than a year they would probably need more sophistication and get on our enterprise plan. So it actually really really became a good source of where pipeline came from for our mid-market and small business customers. At Retool it’s a little bit different. Right At Retool what we found is there’s a segment of our customers that just will never be as sophisticated as some of these larger accounts. So we’ve designed our self-service plans to be like the permanent home for these customers. We know they’ll always live in self-service. They’ll never, ever need to grow and mature and we’ve kind of crafted our plans and our pricing to accommodate that for these customers to have a permanent home in self-service.

Sophie Buonassisi: 9:02

Before we dive in, a quick word on hiring. It’s a weird market out there right now, but finding top go-to-market talent is still one of the biggest levers for growth. At GTM Fund, we’ve made over 2,000 candidate intros and placed hundreds of eight players. One of our go-to recruiting partners is Pursuit. They specialize in sales and marketing talent and they do it without a retainer. We work with them closely across many roles.

Sophie Buonassisi: 9:22

If you’re hiring, go to pursuitsalesolutionscom forward slash GTM That’ll be in the show notes, or paying someone from the GTM that’ll be in the show notes, or paying someone from the GTM fund team. We’ll get you connected. Now on to the episode. And if you don’t have, it sounds like at Auth0, you might have had kind of a usage base or functionality base baked into the product where they were hitting triggers. Is that correct?

Ghazi Masood: 9:41

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I mean, yeah, user threshold numbers, just basically going past their MEU allotment and also using features that weren’t really part of the self-service plan. So, again, we would not gate anything, which is an interesting conversation to usually have with organizations. We would basically allow customers to use anything they actually wanted. But we clearly had definitions and documentation that stated that if you aren’t self-service, you have access to X. So what would happen is certain customers, if they started using things like multi-factor authentication or they had more users than what their plan allowed, that would basically be a signal for sales to potentially reach out to these customers and just have a good conversation. Go, hey, we understand, it’s been three months and you’re kind of using these capabilities. Just know that that’s not part of your plan. Let’s kind of get you right size into the right plan. So that’s really how we kind of designed our packages.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:35

Oh, interesting. Okay, so you weren’t gating anything. They could use any functionality and then that would be a trigger, a signal for the sales team to then reach out. Put a Tetron Sounds like.

Ghazi Masood: 10:46

That’s right.

Sophie Buonassisi: 10:47

Like, if there is nothing gated, you know, would access to some of those premium functionalities expire at a certain point.

Ghazi Masood: 10:57

No, our philosophy was we want people to use the product and we want them to get what they need out of the product Right. And again, this wasn’t a hardcore sales approach where if someone is two users over their allotment, they’re going to get a call from sales and sales is going to move them over to the plan. This was like sustained Like if there’s like three months of use of something they’re not licensed for, they’re probably going to get a call from someone in sales to kind of right-size them into the plan. So it was a very mutual conversation. We hardly had any conflict with customers and usually customers know that if they’re using capabilities like this, they probably need to move over to the plan. And again, everything is documented. So it’s kind of spelled black and white as to what that plan includes and what that plan doesn’t include.

Sophie Buonassisi: 11:42

That’s a really, really interesting model, ghazi, because we see a lot of companies gating it and making it very evident. You know when you’re hitting that trigger. You’ve got a pop-up, you’ve got some kind of blocker to actual utilization, but you took the opposite approach. You un-gated everything. Having taken that approach, having seen tons of other PLG companies now through companies you work for, companies you advise, is there an approach that you would recommend over the other?

Ghazi Masood: 12:09

Self-service should be about getting as many users onto your platform as quickly as possible and being as frictionless as you can be within your signup flow.

Ghazi Masood: 12:17

Right, you want to get mass adoption on self-service and again, you want to be clear what self-service is for right.

Ghazi Masood: 12:25

And then if, all of a sudden, if customers get on self-service and they’re loving your product and adoption is going through the roof, they’re doing more, more and more, I think that’s a great thing. It’s good for the customer, it’s good for you as a company and then you can actually eventually kind of help the customer kind of grow and mature into the right plan that they actually see. So I think if it’s done right and if it’s done correctly, with just a lot of upfront data and documentation, I think it really is a frictionless conversation. I don’t think any customer I mean there are customers I think if I recall back on those days, there were clearly customers who weren’t aware that, oh my God, they’ve gone over their usage limit by X, they’ve brought their users back down and that’s okay. But there are also customers that continue to have excess usage, that you actually end up right-sizing the plant. So I actually prefer that model. It just allows for frictionless adoption of the technology and the solution and super tactical.

Sophie Buonassisi: 13:21

But what does that documentation you mentioned look like?

Ghazi Masood: 13:25

So it’s just plans on our website. So all of the price plans are published on the website under the pricing page, and under the pricing page you can actually see I think the names that we actually had were. There was a free plan, then I think there was the business plan. I think the business plan I forget the name of the other one, but I think there are different plans. Think of it as like bronze, silver, gold, right. So if you have those plans published on your website and you kind of say, hey, if you sign up for the bronze plan, here’s what the bronze plan actually includes. If you go to the silver plan, here’s what the silver plan includes. So it’s clearly documented on the website as to what plan the customer is actually signing up for.

Sophie Buonassisi: 14:05

Love it. And let’s say there’s a company that is entirely PLG right now. They’re PLG. They want to layer in an SLG approach and start to move and create that SLG motion and muscle in general. Everything is gated by, you know, paywalls that they hit. It’s entirely product driven. Right now they want to layer that in. Would the first step be then to ungate everything and actually then do the sales outreach accordingly and to peel back all the gatekeeping within the product?

Ghazi Masood: 14:38

Yeah, you could gatekeep it. Make sure your plans are clearly published on your website or on what each plan includes the price point for each plan and just let it go. And just let it go and see where customers kind of naturally migrate. That’s all it’s going to do.

Sophie Buonassisi: 14:56

Love it? Yeah, love it. Pricing is certainly one of the hardest parts of scaling SaaS.

Ghazi Masood: 15:01

It is.

Sophie Buonassisi: 15:03

How did you figure out when it was time to move from pay-as-you-go to annual contracts?

Ghazi Masood: 15:10

Yeah, I mean so pay-as-you-go. Most self-service customers in both Retool and Auth0, they’re pay-as-you-go. They’re basically monthly credit card swipes right, they’re monthly credit card swipes right, they’re monthly credit card swipes. We did provide discounts for customers who would sign up for annual contracts, but very few self-service customers actually sign up for annual contracts. They actually want to just do pay-as-you-go and swipe credit cards, which I think is fine. I think it comes down to sophistication. So as customers mature and grow and they know themselves they’re not really a self-service profiled account because they’re using a lot more users or they’re using these advanced capabilities, then I think it’s a natural conversation to talk to sales and get into an annual contract and again, that’s also published on the website, right, knowing that if you actually ever outgrow these plans, you do have to be on an annual contract and talk to sales.

Sophie Buonassisi: 16:00

Makes sense. Ghazi, you’ve advised and worked at a ton of incredible companies, notably PLG product-led growth companies. What’s the biggest go-to-market mistake that you see early-stage companies making right now?

Ghazi Masood: 16:18

Yeah, I think, from a PLG perspective, I think the biggest thing I think companies struggle with is to really really define, you know, if you don’t know what the role of self-service in your business should be, right, I think you really really need to define what the role of self-service is to really kind of help determine the journey you want to take your customers on.

Ghazi Masood: 16:39

So that’s one thing. The other thing also is for a lot of PLG companies and in fact the companies that you’re referencing, like Odd Zero and Retool that I was at, they were PLG, but they were PLG to a very, very specific persona, Like it was a technical buyer, it was developers and engineers that were really engaging with the product, and developers and engineers don’t like to deal with salespeople, right. So I think one of the things that we did that had a huge, huge advantage is to have like product-based reach-outs within self-service to those folks out there where if it’s a new feature, new capability, you know, new ship that’s coming out, you basically have product-based updates that it’s going out. I think that’s another thing that a lot of PLG companies sometimes don’t really incorporate or do right out of the gate with that, which I think is super, super beneficial.

Sophie Buonassisi: 17:31

Incredible, and I’ve heard you say that the traditional account model doesn’t really fit AI-native companies like Cursor Windsurf. What structure does work in that case?

Ghazi Masood: 17:42

Yeah, yeah, this is a fun topic to riff on, like we could probably have an entire podcast. Uh, you said this topic. It’s crazy, right. I mean, I think, as everyone sees, um, the, the traditional b2b sass landscape is completely evolving. You’ve got companies getting to 100 million dollars really coming out of stealth mode with no salespeople, and you know it’s just fantastic to see that level of growth out there.

Ghazi Masood: 18:10

I think for these companies, I think the traditional B2B SaaS model doesn’t really apply, right, I mean, why would you want to go hire a bunch of SDRs, salespeople, ses, customer success people, where you’ve grown to $100 billion without a single one of them, right? I mean, if I was a founder of one of those companies, I would be kind of questioning the same thing. So what my belief is and this is my personal belief I think, like for these organizations, as they scale and grow, they need to kind of rethink their go-to-market footprint. And what I think is going to start evolving and you’re starting to see this a little bit in some companies out there is the role of what I kind of call a GTM engineer.

Ghazi Masood: 18:51

You can kind of label it what you want, but essentially what a GTM engineer is is it’s a kind of a jack of all trades. They’re one individual. But that individual can play the role of an SDR, they can qualify pipeline, they can play the role of an SE and demo the product, they can actually go out and close the deal like an account executive and they can also do upsell like an account manager or a CSF. So that’s a tough role. So that’s basically almost like four roles in one. But I think, as these organizations scale and grow and try to run like an efficient model, I think it’s the way to go. I think it’s really the way to go is having somebody who can kind of specialize in all one of those areas.

Sophie Buonassisi: 19:30

So do you think that will entirely replace specialization with go-to-market engineers and these more broad roles then?

Ghazi Masood: 19:40

At some point. I think the equation that I kind of think about is these organizations that are scaling so fast. They know they need to put a go-to-market foundation in place and I think this is probably the best way for them to start. Obviously, as those companies involve and they have, like multi-product and more complex things to go sell, that will probably augment their approach to this. But my belief in what I just mentioned is just right out of the gate. You know, as organizations scale and grow and I’m talking about companies like Lovable Replit Cursor I think they’re all gravitating towards this, right. Even their founding teams are, because I’ve had conversations with them they’re like hey, we’ve gone to $100, $150 million with not a single sales rep. Why do I need a sales rep, right? So I think this is a model for those type of companies that want to kind of grow efficiently and grow in a manner that’s sustainable for them for that period of time.

Sophie Buonassisi: 20:34

Is this what you then recommend to a lot of the PLG companies that you advise? Would it be, when they’re looking to go SLG, to actually hire a GTM engineer or equivalent, first be?

Ghazi Masood: 20:44

when they’re looking to go SLG to actually hire a GTM engineer or equivalent first. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the company, right? I think not necessarily for SLG. I think for PLG this could be like a very, very good function.

Ghazi Masood: 20:58

I think SLG in these organizations is probably a bit different, because you’re testing your messaging, you’re trying to go outbound and you’re trying to see so you have to kind of see the traction you’re getting If you’re getting the level of qualification that you are on inbound and your messages are resonating and the pipeline is just a shrunk and potentially you could adopt the same model on outbound. But usually what I find and again proof will be the pudding, because I think a lot of this is also so new is is the outbound messaging resonating as fast as what inbound is? With a lot of these companies out there? I think kind of time will tell A lot of these companies. By the way, they don’t really have an outbound motion today at all. It’s all purely inbound and there’s so much pent up demand and stuff that they can’t get to. They need to go staff a role like this to actually capture that demand. So outbound just kind of just depends on the traction and the volume that you actually see in the business.

Sophie Buonassisi: 21:54

Definitely. We’ve got one of our portfolio companies. They launched in within three days. It’s a PLG company. It’s about building web apps, mobile apps, no code, not anything. But they launched and within three days they had over 3 million views. They went viral, they had over 500,000 signups. So they’re in a similar situation where a sales rep is the last thing they’re thinking about. They’re thinking about how do I hire and maintain the actual demand that we already have? So the go-to-market engineer role is a pivotal one in that.

Ghazi Masood: 22:25

Absolutely, absolutely.

Sophie Buonassisi: 22:28

Just tying it all together a little bit. And so let’s say, just to riff on this a little bit further, because we could spend the whole session on this but let’s say somebody hires a go-to-market engineer in and you mentioned to start with the go-to-market foundation. What, in your opinion, does that starting of the go-to-market foundation look like for a PLG company?

Ghazi Masood: 22:50

I would say universal is to hire good people and build a foundation. Most companies who are successful are successful because of the talent and the foundation that’s laid out without any bottlenecks. So I think what’s universal is you got to go find good people. You know references and track record and stuff they’ve actually done. You definitely want to go do that.

Ghazi Masood: 23:11

What breaks sometimes that I’ve seen that organizations is sometimes people are very, very quick to throw bodies at the problem. They’ll say, oh my God, we need 50 salespeople or we need 50 GTM engineers. I think you need to be very, very systematic and pragmatic when you go hire people and the number of people you go hire. So usually you want to make sure you’ve got enough demand and enough pipeline needs to go support the number of people you go hire out there. But again, what’s universal to me is you’ve got to go hire good people. You’ve got to make sure they come from a good background that’s kind of relevant to your industry. And then you want to make sure you know you’re working with finance and rev ops and the rest of the team to really really determine the number of folks you actually need and is that the right number? Can the business sustain it and can really really sustain it, or do they need to actually slow down or go faster, depending on where the pipeline starts?

Sophie Buonassisi: 24:05

Makes sense and you’ve led go-to-market at some of the most iconic companies in tech Microsoft, oracle, acero, retool. What’s a leadership principle that you take with you everywhere?

Ghazi Masood: 24:17

like three things about me and my leadership style is I’m one that kind of leads by example. So I’m constantly out in the field helping the team win and interface a lot with customers out there. And, you know, really like to establish this notion of like we win together and we lose together. Right there isn’t like if you win a big deal, it’s not just the AE who gets all the recognition, it’s a team, collaborative effort. And if we lose the deal, it’s not just on like the CSM that we lost the deal or product. You know we kind of lose together and we learn from it. And then, finally, you know, as everyone knows, b2b SaaS is hard. It’s a lot of hours, a lot of crazy hours and you want to make sure you have fun along the way. And those are like the three big things for me in the culture that I like to go out and build.

Sophie Buonassisi: 25:10

Always fun, yeah, always fun. Necessary Building is hard, somebody said the other day actually, you know, you think it gets easier after the initial building stages. It doesn’t. It just changes and evolves. It’s always hard and that’s the fun. So, finding the fun in the process, that’s right. Those are fantastic leadership principles and I love that everyone would say the same thing too. You’ve got the consistency. Yeah, any frameworks that you found particularly helpful that you’d recommend?

Ghazi Masood: 25:36

Oh God, I’ve done so many over the years. You know everything from like Sandler to MedPick. I mean my favorite are like a MedPick and Solution Sales 2.0. And Solution Sales 2.0 is a different iteration of the original Solution Sales model that used to be out there. So I incorporated both of these at some of the recent companies that I’ve been at. So I’m a big fan of those. Medpick and Solution Sales are the two that kind of resonate and stand out to me.

Sophie Buonassisi: 26:03

Brilliant. And what about resources? Is there a book that’s made the biggest impact on your career? Ghazi.

Ghazi Masood: 26:15

A lot of good books out there. There’s Good to Grade, there’s, I mean, a lot of good books out there that I’m sure many of you are aware of, but the few recently at both of my recent companies that we leveraged, that we basically kind of actually adopted their leadership and organizational principles, is the table group and the five dysfunctions of a team. So that’s a really, really good book to really really understand the dynamics of the team and how to collaborate and work effectively well as a leadership organization, and that really applies to the entire org. It really, really helps you set your operational discipline, kind of your cadence that you want to run the business and kind of how you want to, what you want to prioritize and what you want to focus on. So I highly recommend that book. Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Sophie Buonassisi: 26:59

We’ll drop it in the show notes and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you a little bit about AI. If anything, it feels like it’s getting more important or will get more important with the advent of AI and the ability to send emails at ease and have them streamed out of your inbox the way that you’ve got it streamlined right. So how do you actually break through the noise and get that human interaction 100% Brilliant and where can people find you if they want to follow your journey or get in touch?

Ghazi Masood: 27:25

LinkedIn is a good spot. I try to keep that up to date the best I can. I’m happy to engage with anyone who reaches out to help. I’ve been in the go-to-market for a very, very long time and I like to help individuals go out and either help advance their careers or help in any which way I can by giving them advice. So happy to engage with any of you.

Sophie Buonassisi: 27:44

That’s incredible. Thank you, Ghazi. We appreciate the conversation here today and then everything that you do for.

Sophie Buonassisi

Sophie Buonassisi is the SVP of Marketing at media company GTMnow and its venture firm, GTMfund. She oversees all aspects of media, marketing, and community engagement. Sophie leads the GTMnow editorial team, producing content exploring the behind the scenes on the go-to-market strategies responsible for companies’ growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind the strategies and companies.