GTM 13: How to Hire People who are Wired for Greatness with Suresh Khanna

Suresh Khanna is the Co-Founder and COO at Pieces. He is the former CRO and president of AdRoll Group, where he led the go-to-market strategy, scaled sales, success, and support teams from 10 to 400 people, and increased revenue from about $3 million to over $150 million when he left. Suresh also established award-winning training and development programs that helped the company win Best Place to Work multiple times What You Will Learn:How to build a performance culture that works.How AI advancement could impact go-to-market and agencies.How to maintain raw energy while scaling. Highlights:(5:12) Suresh’s background and story.(10:00) Why Suresh turned down a once-in-a-lifetime McKinsey job at 26.(12:22) Suresh’s experience at Google.(13:22) Why Suresh left Google for AdRoll.(14:39) Suresh’s success at AdRoll.(14:39) Suresh founding Pieces.(17:00) AI advancement and its potential impact on go-to-market and agencies.(25:21) How to build a winning performance culture.(28:54) How to find and hire people wired for greatness.(34:01) How to train managers to make better hiring decisions and scale the hiring process.(38:29) How to reduce new hire ramp-up time.(44:20) How AdRoll created a winning self-policing culture.(46:20) What Suresh would do differently.(49:15) How to keep the raw energy when rapidly scaling.(53:32) The number one reason startups fail.(57:30) Summary of Suresh’s career learnings.Guest Speaker Link:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khannasuresh/Host Speaker Links:LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ssbarker/Newsletter: thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/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.