The AI-Native GTM Playbook | Sam Blond, Monaco

**Turner Novak** (0:02)
Sam, welcome to the show.

**Sam Blond** (0:04)
Turner, thank you for having me.

**Turner Novak** (0:05)
I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. So you, I think you're most well known for scaling Brex to I think 12 billion was kind of what the headline numbers will say.
I thought it'd be fun to do kind of like a deep dive, kind of like modern GTM playbook. The world's changed a little bit since you've done that. I know you were just telling me before we started recording, you've thought a lot about it, but you haven't really talked about it much publicly. It'd be interesting, what has changed the most in the sales process over the past couple of years?

**Sam Blond** (0:35)
Yeah. Well, as I said, thanks for having me. Brex, just for context, maybe as we segue into how things changed, I left Brex in beginning early 2022 If you think about the evolution of AI, my entire experience at Brex, which sort of ranged 2018 to 2022, it was all pre-AI.
Then I spent some time with Founders Fund, and then this started as a bit of an incubation there, and then Monaco became its own independent business.
But things are quite different, both from 2018 when I joined Brex, and then 2022 when I eventually left. I think that there are specific sales workflows that AI and agents are just better than humans at, and these are the things that are fully online. I'll give a few examples of what those things are, and then I can pattern match to the time at Brex and where people were spending their time. An example would be building your TAM based off of your ICP.
You're a company, you want to sell to a bunch of companies, you have an idea of what does this list of companies look like. Let's go create a database of all of the companies that we want to sell to. Historically speaking, that is where it's called prospecting. That is where a lot of salespeople and maybe even founders, if it was pre-hiring sales folks, spent their time. Going on LinkedIn, finding different company types, logging into databases, running lists, filtering the data, exporting the data, manipulating those lists, adding different employee counts in different locations and different verticals and sub-verticals.

**Turner Novak** (2:13)
So this is trying to qualify if you need, your specific customer needs to meet, it's probably a certain size company, certain thing that they do, etc. So you're saying that they're manually going through in a spreadsheet, possibly maybe there's some tools like a, there's some that exists that will give you a dump out, but you're filtering this down manually.

**Sam Blond** (2:32)
That's right. So you just want to create a database of companies that you can sell to. Doing that historically speaking, it's an iterative process, but it takes a lot of time.

**Turner Novak** (2:43)
What percentage of time of the general sales process was this stuff?

**Sam Blond** (2:48)
Well, if you are dedicated to outbound and generating demand, so like an SDR, some meaningful percentage of your time when I was at Brex and Pre-AI was dedicated to finding new companies that you can reach out to. Then the outreach was actually maybe the easier part of the process. You just drop someone in a pre-written sequence. But finding the right people at the right time, that took a lot of time and it took a lot of labor resources in this category of sales. So there's this concept of building your TAM, so finding all the companies that you can sell to, scoring your accounts because not every company is created equal. So if you think about, let's say, we'll just leverage Monaco or even Brex because it's similar as an example, you're selling to startups.
Well, not all startups are created equal. There are going to be some that have dynamics about that business that make it a better fit for you to sell to. Are they in San Francisco? You know, for us, we may want to more highly score or highly prioritize an account that is headquartered in San Francisco.
There are going to be some that are like the sweet spot for employee count range. There are going to be some that are like business model. Is it sales led growth? Is it product led growth? Some dynamics of the company that influence the way that you may want to prioritize that company. So, historically speaking, this was like a very manual process. So, you build your TAM, you score your accounts, you then overlay signals. So, these are things like visiting the website. Are they hiring for a certain role? Again, you can kind of like do this with a human, but agents are just better at this stuff today.