Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Sager: Unifying GTM functions under segment leaders boosted Plaid's CSAT and upselling

Eric Sager · Why great leaders make themselves obsolete | Eric Sager (COO, Plaid) · Jul 16, 2026 · at 20:14

Eric Sager is the COO of Plaid. He describes restructuring Plaid's sales, account management, and support organizations into customer-segment-led units to eliminate friction between functional handoffs.

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“So one thing that we did is we then created our segments. But then we put all the functions within the segment together so that the person leading the segment owned the entire end-to-end customer relationship, right? And so suddenly, even if it wasn't the exact same person doing it, you had somebody much closer to the customer who was accountable for making sure that like their, the customer's experience with our sales team smoothly translated into the customer's experience with our account management team smoothly translated into the experience with our support team and so forth and so on. And that just dramatically improved both Customer satisfaction overall, their ability to implement and scale kind of their initial product and use case, and then our ability to successfully cross sell and upsell them into all these other solutions that we had available.”

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