Dominic Grill, Head of Technical Success at OpenAI, explains the operational pitfalls of prematurely verticalizing sales teams across industries like financial services.
“My hot takes, I think companies rush to verticalization a little too early. And I do think you have to really understand what your overall value proposition and get your core sales motion going before you just rush to verticalization. Because the challenge that you have is that vertical is not just a go to market strategy. It's also a product strategy.”
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More from Dominic Grill
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Grill: Many Enterprises Buy ChatGPT Enterprise Without Defined Use Cases
“There's a lot of companies right now that, and this is a luxury to be in this position, but for something like ChatGPT Enterprise, they are purchasing without a defined use case in mind”
Dominic GrillJun 28, 2024▶ 18:06Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC
Disclosure
Grill: OpenAI turns down direct account team support for smaller enterprise customers
“We have to. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't mean that we don't turn them down from a technology perspective, but it means that we can only work with them directly with an account team at a certain level of scale.”
Dominic GrillJun 28, 2024▶ 6:01Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC
Insight
Grill: Enterprise AI innovation comes from business units, not ML teams
“One is that a lot of large enterprises think that the innovation is going to start with their machine learning team or their data science team. And what we're seeing a lot of innovation happen is actually at the line of business level, the people that are clos…”
Dominic GrillJun 28, 2024▶ 8:41Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Grill: OpenAI's enterprise projects with Klarna and Spotify took nine months
“When we talk about some of these companies like Klarna or Spotify or Morgan Stanley that have really done something transformational, I think we all have to keep in mind, we started those projects probably nine months ago, and it takes time and iteration in or…”
Dominic GrillJun 28, 2024▶ 9:29Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC
Insight
Grill: Enterprises validate on frontier models before optimizing costs with smaller models
“You start and validate with the most reasonable And the most intelligent, the frontier model, in our case, GPT-FORO. But once you've validated that the use case is possible, then you try and cost optimize and look for if you can still accomplish that with the …”
Dominic GrillJun 28, 2024▶ 16:31Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC
Insight
Grill: Very few companies have a serious strategy for deploying AI
“It's been shown actually multiple times that lots of companies have interest in AI. But very few companies actually have a serious strategy in place around how to go in and deploy and make use of the technology.”
Dominic GrillJun 28, 2024▶ 6:55Mastering SaaS Sales Hiring, Customer Retention, and Growth with OpenAI, Retool, and 20VC
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