Michelle Kim
All right, is this thing on? Is it working? Can you guys hear me okay? No, it’s not full. How about now? Testing, yeah, okay, great. Hi everyone. My name is Michelle Kim. I’m a Women in Revenue board member and a RevOps executive, and I’m really excited for us to talk about what we call this, “Post-Sale Power Plays: Alignment Across the Full Customer Journey.” I’m really excited to have this chat with Larkin Dahal, who is with Spekit, and Craig Hanson from Gong. So I’m going to let them each introduce themselves with just one maybe “aha” moment story around when they noticed an exceptional example of GTM alignment around the full customer journey. Maybe Larkin, you can start.

Larkin Dahal
Absolutely. Thank you all for being here. I know we’re between you and the bar, so I know it’s not the most popular slot. I appreciate that. I run CS at Spekit, which does include account management. I would say on this topic, a good outcome is like a 30% increase in renewals or expansions year one, meaning customers newly coming on board and upselling the first year. To me, that signifies that there is alignment, like the sales reps are uncovering needs, the CS team is implementing them well, and the account management team is really aligned to the goals and staying close to the CS team. And obviously, the product is driving the value that we promised during the sales cycle. I think that’s a good outcome. One thing that’s really helped operationalize that is comp plans. Making sure that everyone on the team is incentivized, and ensuring that if you have account managers, they have some NRR or GR component. That’s something that’s helped me.

Craig Hanson
Nice. Great to meet everybody. Craig Hanson, I lead market strategy at Gong and am part of our revenue transformation team. In that role, I get to work at the executive level with all the largest customers across a bunch of different industries. We see this issue of alignment across the customer journey as one of those key sticking points or challenges across a lot of companies. The statistic that stands out in my head always is a McKinsey percentage that 77% of strategic initiatives fail, which is really scary. As we all get into the annual planning and budgeting cycle, thinking about, okay, well, which seven out of our ten are going to fail if we’re like the statistics? And of course, as leaders, you think, there’s no way that can be possible.

Where I see things get tripped up with companies over time is this lack of alignment across the organization. You may have initiatives in one area, but you don’t have the end-to-end visibility on alignment and execution to actually be able to bring it to fruition. It’s one of those interesting areas where AI helps us both drive the imperative for doing that differently and gives us the tool to actually be able to get that organizational alignment. We can get visibility where before we had none and connect all of these groups and processes that, at human scale, there’s no way we could possibly get a handle on all the information, all the interactions, everything that’s going on. I think we’re at the cusp of really interesting ways to replatform and change how we solve those customer outcomes and hopefully meaningfully change that McKinsey statistic.

Michelle Kim
Wouldn’t we all like to change that statistic? So you teed me up perfectly. Would love to hear from you both — it’s 2025, right, who is not talking about AI? Would love to hear how AI is evolving the customer journey and how we interact with our customers.

Larkin Dahal
Yeah, I mean, I think post-sale we see something similar to what we’re seeing in the marketing funnel. We hear all the time now that the marketing funnel is not a funnel. It’s like a bunch of disparate touchpoints, and you try to triangulate and see what’s working. Post-sale, things are happening much quicker. It’s a confusing market for buyers. There’s a lot of overlap in tools. Buyers are obviously accessing information through LLMs, so they’re more informed, or perhaps think they’re more informed, but maybe the information isn’t exactly accurate in the LLM.

The rate of change is also rapid. Things are happening so quickly from a competitive and innovation standpoint. The way we interact with our customers — messaging, positioning, pricing — is all changing very rapidly. A lot of the old playbooks around enablement and keeping information updated are outdated. What customers expect of us, especially in this space where there is a lot of convolution, means that teams on the front line need to be able to have a clear perspective of where your tool fits and the value you can drive. There are also many more personas in the buying cycle now. Those are some of the things that are top of mind for us.

Craig Hanson
I think about three core levels where I see AI actually transforming what’s going on in companies. The first level is using AI to simplify or automate tasks — help me do things easier and simpler. There’s a good use case for that, and that’s typically where companies start, though many stop there. The second level of value isn’t just doing things simpler and faster but doing things better. That starts to get interesting because now I have to have the depth of understanding to know what “better” means. I’m not just automating activities or syncing things faster or getting more emails out; I’m trying to do things better.

The third level of evolution is doing things everywhere. By that, I mean standardizing those best practices. Now we can actually use the scale of AI — if it’s ingrained, if it’s the platform we’re running on — to guide our entire team to consistent execution. The AI can understand how to use Larkin’s killer talk track and messaging, when to employ Michelle’s great objection handling, or when a risk or cross-sell opportunity arises. It’s automatically guiding my entire team to the consistent execution of best practices. That’s where organizations truly transform.

Michelle Kim
Everything, everywhere, all at once — the name of our new session. So, getting beyond basic automation, what are some tools and processes that you’ve implemented or seen that enable customer-facing teams to work with customers in real time?

Larkin Dahal
I’d say we’re midway through that funnel. We’ve gotten a little bit beyond basic automation. Some things that work are broader visibility — aggregating conversation intelligence data, using it to look across our customer base at what competitors are coming up, pricing, etc. We’ve implemented feedback loops so that if customer calls mention competitors or pricing, we feed that back into battle cards to update them in real time.

Given the rate of change, it’s really important to use automation to update your materials at scale. Our own product solves this, but there are other tools as well. You need mechanisms to manage change consistently across the org so folks are using updated messaging and positioning. It’s a journey, but those are some things top of mind.

Michelle Kim
When we were prepping for this discussion, you gave me some really good real-life examples. Can you share some of those you’re implementing?

Larkin Dahal
It’s so hard to believe the robots are going to take over when microphones don’t work. Okay, it’s working now. One of the things our customers do — and we do too — are interviews of workflows. It’s important that before you automate, you understand the manual processes. One of my clients calls it “pain in the ass testing.” Basically, sitting with reps or folks on the front lines and actually looking at how they navigate conversations and tools. That helps you understand what’s most helpful to automate and how to make automation credible and effective if you really understand field workflows.

Craig Hanson
I think of three things that form the foundation for companies that successfully take advantage of AI. The first is data. AI is only as good as the data and understanding it’s built upon. CRM data is often limited — reps only enter a fraction of what’s said. So we add activity-level data, like calls and emails, but that still doesn’t measure quality. To make AI useful, it needs to understand quality — which lives in interactions like calls, emails, and the voice of the customer.

Second, AI needs depth of understanding — concept-level understanding beyond keywords. That’s the core of how Gong was built. It’s not just what’s happening, but how it maps to key behaviors, best practices, and decision-making. Third, once you have that, you can guide humans or agents on what to do. The rubric is data, insights, and actions — useful when evaluating any GTM AI platform.

Michelle Kim
I attended a session earlier where someone shared how their company uses AI to identify when real-world messaging is off-brand. How do you enable your reps to stay on brand and consistent across the customer lifecycle?

Larkin Dahal
Getting back to Craig’s point on measurement, it’s important to have a feedback loop. Foundationally, you need to know whether value-based selling is being used — and whether it’s working. Monitor the efficacy of your enablement, messaging, and training as things evolve.

We use Spekit — it’s highly contextual. Depending on your role, region, or persona, you get targeted messaging and positioning right in your flow of work. The foundational work is knowing what works: what CMOs versus CROs care about, how to position to a CIO, etc. The hard part is crafting that messaging, but adoption and measurement are key.

Craig Hanson
You start with visibility, then use AI to measure and improve what “good” looks like. For example, when we rolled out new messaging at Gong, we could instantly see adoption and weak points across thousands of interactions. We tied it to results and saw that when reps mentioned our 250-plus integrations and AI ecosystem, conversion rates doubled from 27% to 59%. Within two weeks, we enabled that across the team, and usage skyrocketed. Once you have real data behind it, it creates a flywheel effect of continuous improvement.

Michelle Kim
I want to emphasize that. When I was a sales rep, I had to go listen to senior reps I admired. Now, RevOps does that for me, showing which phrases and questions improve outcomes. It’s so important that we can capture, aggregate, and derive insights from this information.

Thank you both for sharing. It sounds like you’re doing amazing things, and that’s why your companies are in amazing spots. Now I’d love to open it up to the audience. We heard about a few “aha” moments where Larkin and Craig noticed how GTM alignment propelled the customer journey. I’m curious if anyone here has an “aha” moment or a current challenge related to alignment. Maybe you’ve seen a problem your company fixed and can share how. Any volunteers? Everyone wants a cocktail? Okay, we’ve only got a minute anyway.

Craig Hanson
How many of you have started implementing AI systems or platforms in your organization?

Larkin Dahal
Okay, great.

Craig Hanson
How many feel like you’re already getting the impact you wanted? How many feel like you’re still in progress?

Michelle Kim
Could we hear from the person who’s gotten value — is that you, Nick? Do you want to share?

Nick
You never know which mic will work. We’re a relatively new startup, so for us, it’s about automating basic processes. We do intake interviews for founders and executive-led content, and it was taking our Google notes and CRM notes from our call recorder and putting them directly into HubSpot so our engineering team could use them. It was just a simple integration, but it worked super well. It’s impactful, and our engineers can start making posts and content super easily.

Michelle Kim
Nice, super actionable. It sounds like we’re right on time. Let’s give it up for Larkin and Craig. Thank you so much, everyone, for being a wonderful audience.