Karan Mehandru & Anna Baird on Go-To-Market Strategy, and Navigating Sales, Growth, and Leadership

This week, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru hosts Madrona Operating Partner Anna Baird. The operating partner role is a new one for Madrona, and we're excited to have her on the team to advise our founders. Before transitioning to board positions in the last couple of years, Anna was most recently the CRO at Outreach. Before that, she was the COO at Outreach, and before that, she was the CFO at several companies. That trifecta of C-Suite experience gives Anna a unique perspective to help founders navigate any blind spots they may have. Anna and Karan, who is on the board of Outreach, dive into how the sales profession has changed, how the role of the CRO has changed since COVID, how to talk to customers, how to build high-performance sales teams, go-to-market strategy, AI's role in sales, and so much more. These two tackle it all, and it's a must-listen. Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/karan-mehandru-anna-baird-go-to-market-strategy/ Chapters: (00:00:40) Introduction(00:02:14) How Anna Baird got into tech with an accounting major?(00:06:13) Changes in the sales profession since COVID.(00:09:56) Creating a go-to-market strategy.(00:12:38) Balancing growth and profitability.(00:15:05) Building a high-performance sales team.(00:18:31) Why Madrona?(00:22:21) Don't try to make failure look pretty.(00:24:27) Is AI going to take all the sales jobs away? (00:25:43) Book recommendation.