GTM 121: Listening to Your Customers Without Obeying with Crunchbase’s CRO Neal Patel

Nealesh Patel is nan CRO astatine Crunchbase, a starring level for backstage institution intelligence. With complete 25 years of acquisition successful nan tech industry, Neal has a proven way grounds of executing progressive maturation strategies, landing innovative partnerships, processing gross streams, and building winning teams. As nan leader of Crunchbase’s go-to-market functions (Strategic Partnerships, Sales, BD, Marketing, Customer Success/Experience, Revenue Operations), arsenic good arsenic nan de facto wide head of its information licensing business, Neal has a cross-functional and holistic knowing of really to supply worth to customers, make revenue, and accelerate growth. Under his leadership, Crunchbase has much than 4X’d its unsocial users, accrued its yearly recurring gross by complete 75x, and secured partnerships pinch ample brands for illustration S&P, LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Monday.com, Perplexity, G2, Factset, Amazon, and Snowflake. Neal is besides an progressive committee member, advisor, and investor successful respective high-growth startups, wherever he leverages his expertise and web to thief them standard and succeed.

Discussed successful this Episode:

• The value of listening to customers without blindly obeying their requests
• How Crunchbase adapted to nan emergence of ChatGPT and generative AI
• The worth of conducting ongoing customer tours to pass merchandise improvement and strategy
• Insights connected profession maturation and taking risks successful master development
• The early of income guidance successful nan property of AI and rev tech platforms

Highlights:

(03:45) The conception of “listening to customers without obeying”
(09:12) Crunchbase’s consequence to nan merchandise of ChatGPT
(13:58) Developing predictive signals utilizing Crunchbase’s proprietary data
(19:32) Career advice: The value of curiosity and authenticity
(22:15) Taking risks and daring to beryllium “stupid” successful your career
(25:37) The ongoing request for quality income managers successful nan property of AI
(30:42) Why accepted income playbooks whitethorn go obsolete
(34:21) Institutionalizing customer tours arsenic a halfway business practice
(37:55) One point gross leaders judge to beryllium existent that Neal thinks is bull$***
(39:47) One point that is moving for Neal successful go-to-market correct now

• Apollo. The gross tech stack is messy correct now. All nan leaders that I’m talking to are reevaluating their stacks from nan crushed up. Do we really request 10 different solutions? If you are 1 of those leaders, I would urge that you return a look astatine Apollo. Maybe you deliberation you cognize Apollo, possibly you’ve taken a look astatine them successful nan past but I’ve looked nether nan hood precocious and if your extremity is to trim and simplify your tech stack AND person champion successful breed information layered successful pinch AI – they would beryllium astatine nan apical of our list. There’s a logic Rippling and Stripe switched over. We worked pinch their squad to create an interactive demo page – you tin cheque it retired at: https://www.apollo.io/gtm 

The GTM Podcast
Features conversations pinch nan apical 1% of tech executives, VCs, and founders – nan experts who person ‘been there, done that’ to build immoderate of nan fastest-growing package companies. Every week, a impermanent joins Scott Barker to dissect their stories – revealing what worked, what didn’t, and really things really went down.