Ross Rich is the co-founder and CEO of Accord and spent five years leading go-to-market and partnerships at Stripe. He talks to hundreds of CROs and serves thousands of reps, so he has an unusually clear view of what the top performers actually do differently.
His starting point: roughly the top 20%, often closer to 10%, of any sales team drives most of the revenue. Every leader says they want to move the middle 60%, and Ross doesn't think AI is doing it. Tools like Claude and Codex make the people who already have the taste and judgment far more efficient, and the gap widens from there. What closes it is unglamorous and human: a leader with a point of view, a shared language simple enough to stick, a field-friendly process, and only then the technology to reinforce it.
Ross gets specific on what "best" means for a seller (trust and EQ first, then frameworks learned so cold they run subconsciously), the disconnect between what CROs think they're buying and what reps actually receive, the "no-ask note" for multithreading into a CRO, why he sells through his own executives instead of around them, and the biggest lesson of his founder journey: market beats product.
What you'll learn:
- What separates the top 10% of reps from everyone else, and why AI is widening that gap instead of closing it
- The two ingredients of a great seller: the "give a shit factor" you can't fake, then plays run so subconsciously you can get creative
- The waiter analogy that explains great salesmanship in one sentence
- Why the people, process, technology order is the one most teams get backwards in the AI rush
- The disconnect between a CRO's multimillion-dollar investment in the field and what reps actually receive: a 76-page laminate, more Salesforce fields, none of it touching the customer
- Why the best methodology is simply the one that gets used, and why debating how many Ps are in MEDDPICC is optimizing the fringes
- "Unavoidable excellence": how to take what your top performers do organically and make it standard across the team
- The "no-ask note" for multithreading into a CRO by showing respect instead of asking for time
- Why CROs own revenue and not tools, and how to sell through their rev-ops and enablement leaders
- "Show, don't tell": leading with peer references at stage two when everyone can sound the same and ship a surface-level solution
- The founder-led sales handoff mistake Ross has made twice, and the curse of knowledge behind it
- Why market beats product, via April Dunford's positioning and the surfer, surfboard, wave framing
Connect with Ross Rich:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossrich/
Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP at GTMnow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
X: https://x.com/sophiebuona
About the guest: Ross Rich is the founder and CEO of Accord, a platform that operationalizes value selling (quantified business cases, mutual action plans, stakeholder mapping, account planning) in a field-friendly way. Before founding Accord, he spent over five years at Stripe leading go-to-market and partnerships. Accord's customers include Freshworks and Samsara.
About GTMnow: GTMnow is the media arm of GTMfund, sharing how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
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The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
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