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Through GTMnow, I’m sharing how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
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Sophie Buonassisi reposted thisSophie Buonassisi reposted thisMost AI conversations in marketing are still about producing more: more content, more ad variations, and more landing pages. Meagen, CMO of Samsara, described something different on GTMnow Podcast. When Sophie asked her what the future of marketing looks like, she described a morning that doesn't start with a dashboard review and a team huddle. It starts with a note from an agent: 1/ A segment was low on pipeline overnight. 2/ Campaigns have gone live. 3/ Budget has been moved over from where there was a surplus. That changes what a marketer's morning looks like. You're no longer deciding what to run - you're reviewing what has already run. It also raises a question most teams haven't answered yet: what is an agent allowed to do without asking? Someone has to set the limits, such as which segments it can touch, how much it can spend, when a human must approve action, and who owns the agent when the person who built it leaves. Meagan shared that her team plans governance and compliance around the agents they build. For B2B marketing leaders, that's the real prep work for this future. It isn't just giving agents access to the dashboard, past results, and the budget; it's writing down the rules they work within. The leader who sets those rules well will get far more from an agent working overnight than the one who simply switched it on.
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Sophie Buonassisi shared thisNEW: Lessons from building 113 AI agents and reinventing a GTM function with AI. Meagen Eisenberg (Chief Marketing Officer at Samsara) joins GTMnow to break down how she trained a 260-person marketing org to build its own agents, how AI now factors into performance ratings, and much much more. Samsara's marketing team has built 113 agents, with 40 more in the works, and more than half the org has been through an internal agent-building bootcamp. One of those agents cut ABM landing pages from a 2-3 week agency process to under 30 minutes. Key takeaways: 1️⃣ AI is a production shift. Social changed how you reach people. Cloud changed who the buyer was. Covid changed the venue. AI changes how the work itself gets done, so you're not spinning up a team to learn a new channel, you're rebuilding how the whole org operates. 2️⃣ Let the team play before you cap spend. For the first six months, Samsara's change management was simple: give everyone access, run hackathons, reward usage, don't put the brakes on. Caps came later, and there's still no cap for a team driving real outcomes. 3️⃣ Train everyone to build. Don't centralize it. Samsara runs a 2.5 week bootcamp: a week and a half of self-paced coursework on an LMS the team vibe coded, then a week of live classes taught by marketers, ending with every participant building and presenting an agent. The first class shipped 23 agents. A central team of experts building for everyone else doesn't scale, because the expertise lives inside each function. 4️⃣ Put agents where the work already lives. Most of Samsara's GTM agents live in Slack. Around 30% of marketing ops tickets used to be ADRs asking about lead flow and SLAs. Now an agent does the three hours of research, traces the lead's source and campaign, writes the doc, and sends it to the ADR and their manager. 5️⃣ Make AI part of how people get rated. In calibrations, nobody gets a 4 or 5 unless they're actively working with AI and building agents. Meagen set that expectation a year ago and backs it with all-hands showcases, hackathon winners, and spot bonuses. In interviews she skips "do you use it to write" and asks whether AI has actually transformed the candidate's role. 6️⃣ Raise the bar every time capacity goes up. Headcount stayed flat while timelines compressed: two-week projects take one, the content team went from one piece every week or two to ten a day, and the company-wide rebrand rollout took three and a half weeks. Her line to the team: the time invested in agents has to show up as more output, faster output, or both. -- 💚 Thank you to our incredible sponsor for supporting the podcast: - Nooks discover how revenue agents can transform your GTM at nooks.ai/gtmfund 💡 GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
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Sophie Buonassisi reposted thisSophie Buonassisi reposted thisThe GTMnow Podcast has been a go-to for me over the past year on all things revenue & GTM. So it was a huge thrill to get to be a guest on this week's episode, talking all things LinkedIn for Sales, including: - our Trust Advantage research & what the best-performing sellers are doing to build trust in the AI era - what's coming in Sales Navigator (now announced so no more uncomfortable face like the video...) - tips on maximising your presence & strategy on LinkedIn - leading & building from APAC - what my team & I are focused on and what I look for when I'm hiring - hot takes on building a career in GTM today Thanks Sophie Buonassisi for a great conversation & for all you do for the industry! 👏 Watch or listen to the full episode: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gipFjAgD Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gXwqsgMe Apple: https://lnkd.in/gqnRZRZK Kumaresh Pattabiraman Feon Ang 洪雍华 Sai Madhavan Melissa Felton Ally Khantzis Dan Daly Siobhan Waters
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Sophie Buonassisi shared thisNEW: Inside LinkedIn - buyer behavior, how to social sell, and tips to grow your LinkedIn! [in] Plus, a BREAKING exciting announcement from LinkedIn for Sales today: LinkedIn is bringing Sales Navigator directly into the flow of work, starting with Microsoft Teams. Catherine Flynn (VP Marketing, LinkedIn Sales Solutions) joins GTMnow to give us the inside scoop on LinkedIn, buyer behavior and selling. Lots of tips on how to grow your LinkedIn profile in this discussion! Key takeaways: 1️⃣ Every channel works - relevance decides if you get a reply. Email, InMail, phone call, text: all still work. What decides it is whether the message ties to something happening in that business now - a true pain point. 2️⃣ The first call test: is more of it about their business than about you? Use this one simple question to gauge quality of call. The version that works opens with what you noticed, and asks what that means for their strategy. The version that fails opens with your product. Expertise starts with their industry, not your product. 3️⃣ LinkedIn's data: a mutual connection is worth nearly 3x on InMail. Nearly 3x acceptance on InMail and 2x on connection requests versus cold. The fastest path to trust is through someone who already has it. What sellers miss is strength, not existence, and Sales Navigator shows you how strong the tie is. 4️⃣ Top performers use exec sponsors 50% more than everyone else. They treat leaders at their own company as entry points. The highest yield sources are customer advocates and former customers now inside your targets. LinkedIn sellers ask Catherine for intros constantly, and she always says yes. 5️⃣ LinkedIn researched what separates top sellers. It came down to 4 behaviors. (i) Signal based selling, (ii) multithreading, (iii) speed, and (iv) real personalization. On speed, they move within hours of a job change or company event, not days, and LinkedIn's signal is near real time so there's no excuse. 6️⃣ The algorithm ranks point of view, not credentials. LinkedIn ranks content higher when it's helpful, knowledgeable, with a clear POV. You need an interesting take on something happening in your buyer's market. Even if you have great experience, if you aren't providing a clear POV, your post won't get pushed. 7️⃣ LinkedIn is now the #1 cited domain in AI answers (post accordingly). Most cited domain for professional queries, according to Profound. Publishing a real POV improves how your company and product surface in LLM answers. -- 💡 GTMfund shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
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Sophie Buonassisi reposted thisSophie Buonassisi reposted thisOur CMO Loreal Lynch took the mic on the GTMnow podcast 🎙️ She joined the team to talk about where enterprise AI is headed, and what it takes to turn intelligence into real revenue execution. We’re lucky to have Loreal helping shape what comes next at Nooks, and proud to see her bringing that perspective to the broader GTM community! Watch the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gGjD7KqV
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Sophie Buonassisi shared thisYou can tell how much writing is AI vs. human on Substack. Putting the final touches on the GTMnow newsletter edition that is being published later today and thought this was cool. First time checking it and the verdict is in: Can confirm that we aren't 🤖 Real humans over here at GTMfund. Real humans, but sharing on AI this week. Specifically, how to build your AI second brain for GTM! To get a copy in your inbox, subscribe on GTMnow's Substack page. It will be coming to you soon!
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Sophie Buonassisi shared thisGrateful and honored to share I’ve been promoted to Partner at GTMfund. Life is short, and there are 1,440 minutes in every day. Too short to spend working on things you don’t feel insanely passionate about. For me, there's no greater privilege than getting to: - Support innovation at the earliest stage. - Democratize access to the resources that change the trajectory of people's companies, careers and lives. - Connect people in ways that lead to outsized impact. At GTMfund, we get to do all three of the above, every day. Max Altschuler and Paul Irving - thank you for the trust from the very beginning. There's not a day that I don't wake up and feel incredibly grateful to build together. They say time flies when you're having fun, and the past three years have flown by in the best way - thanks to you, and what we're building together. Jason Demant - thank you for being such a collaborative partner. You've leveled up network/community (and much more) already, and I’m excited to continue building this out together. Yoon Li, Casey Van Maanen, Vaibhavi Nesarikar, CPA, Joan Mirano - there's no team that works as passionately and tirelessly. People often ask how we execute on everything that we do. For all the world class processes we have, it ultimately comes down to the people - it comes down to all of the hard work. Grateful to build alongside you - and constantly inspired by you. There are some things that you simply know when you know. All the quantitative measures in the world can't solve for this qualitative one: Do you have the magic? As a team. And I'm so insanely grateful that we have the magic. The past three years have been some of the most enriching ones ever. I'm so proud of what we've built, and continue to build. To our founders - thank you for allowing us to be partners and part of your journey. It’s an honor, and we are all in with you. To our investors - thank you for your trust, belief, and support. I’m constantly blown away by the caliber of this community. I love what we're building, who we're building for, how we're building, and who we're building with. Now, let's keep building. Picture from last year's AGM, since the 2026 one is taking place one month from today, to the exact day (and it's going to be a TIME!!)
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Sophie Buonassisi reposted thisSuch a great time partnering with Jason Demant, Paul Irving, Sophie Buonassisi and the entire GTMfund team! Amazing things happen when you put a group of thought leaders together like this! Looking forward to the next one!Sophie Buonassisi reposted this100 GTM leaders & Friends at 111 Minna last night! Three separate conversations, and all three pointed to the same shift: the scarce thing is no longer the product. == The efficiency is real == A sales leader two years into his current role. Revenue up more than 10x over that period, from low single-digit millions to mid double-digit millions. Headcount up about 50%. He has run go-to-market at several companies before this one. He said the way this one operates does not resemble any of them. == Distribution is the moat == A CEO who took over an older technology business. By his own account, his technology product is not the most innovative one in the category. He doesn't seem to mind. He has the distribution, the company is profitable, and it throws off cash. So he ships fast and undercuts on price, because he already owns the channel. In his words, distribution is the hard part now. == Pricing power came back == A head of sales at a company growing quickly, where reps average 1+ sales per day(!). They're testing higher prices and finding demand inelastic. He also said hiring has started to get easier. Three conversations are not a market. But I haven't heard a room sound like this in a while. Every three years we open the door and add new members to the GTMfund community. We're in that window right now, and this is the room. Link in the comments to apply and make sure you don't miss the next one! Thank you to Zapier, Actively and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) for partnering with us, and to Brad Smith, Blake Guerrero and Joe DiMento for speaking. And to my partner Paul Irving and to Sophie Buonassisi, who filled the room.
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Sophie Buonassisi shared thisNEW: Inside the rise of revenue agents: sales teams of humans + agents. Loreal Lynch is the new CMO at Nooks! She joins GTMnow to break down the human and agent composition of AI-native revenue orgs, her headcount vs. agent hiring filter, why AI-native tools break the moment you drop them into a pre-AI process, how she and her CRO run against one shared pipeline number, and much more. Loreal has watched category creation from the inside three times: - Salesforce in CRM - Tableau in BI and analytics - Stripe in modern payments. She was also a Nooks customer at Jasper before she joined the company, so she'd seen the results firsthand and knew how powerful the product was. Key takeaways: 1️⃣ This is labor augmentation, not labor replacement. The market hears "agent" and thinks headcount cuts. But think of the engineering analogy: nobody responded to AI coding tools by hiring fewer engineers, they hired more and shipped faster. For sales, the compounding output isn't shipping speed, it's closing faster and closing more. 2️⃣ AI will prompt reps, not the other way around. Right now the rep prompts the AI. Nooks is training agents on the feedback loop from the humans they work alongside, and Loreal says those agents are learning to persuade. The endgame is the AI prompting the rep: go call this person, do this after the meeting to accelerate this deal. 3️⃣ You can't put an AI native tool on a pre-AI process. Every tool in the GTM stack was designed with a human as the end user. Agents don't need that interface. The challenge at hand is that the process underneath has to be rebuilt from the ground up. 4️⃣ Building one agent is easy. Scaling agents across a GTM org is more difficult. Self-serve tooling made it feel trivial: write a prompt, save it, you have an agent that does account research. Loreal saw that illusion at Jasper too. What breaks at org scale is everything underneath: shared data, context, governance, and then the execution layer nobody wants to build, email deliverability and dialing infra. 5️⃣ Judgment, reading the room, and narrative are what's left. Marketing was built on specialist roles. Agents absorb that execution, so Loreal's hiring filter is now the skills AI hasn't touched. Reading the room is one: she sat in on a call where the buyer came in visibly annoyed, the AE opened with Florida and surfing, and the whole tone changed. 6️⃣ Delete source attribution targets. Loreal and Hannah Willson, Nooks' CRO, don't hold separate sourced-pipeline numbers for the enterprise business. They hold one shared pipeline goal, reviewed in a weekly pipeline call alongside the forecast call. 7️⃣ The pendulum has swung back to brand. Companies used to win on brand, then two decades moved everything to clicks and cost per acquisition. AI automates away the performance layer, so it stops being a differentiator. What's left is trust and memorability. -- 💡 GTMnow shares how the best in tech build, scale and invest.
Sophie Buonassisi commented on a post
23h
Congratulations on all that you built, Natalie Taylor! Your style of marketing was fantastic and brought Capsule to life.
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Sophie Buonassisi reacted on thisSophie Buonassisi reacted on thisI'm not even going to try to play it cool on this one. I've stepped into an expanded role at Nerdio as Director, Community & Communications! 🎉 That means our team is now taking on PR, internal communications, and customer advocacy. More stories to tell, more ways to tell them, and more people to celebrate along the way. And I get to do it with an ah-ma-zing team. Both Wyatt C. Fay and Jordane Frazier have moved onto my team and joining Tavia C., Chris Gogolos, and Zachary Landes, all of whom are phenomenal. Moments like this are what investing in people actually looks like. New opportunities. A chance to stretch. Leaders who back you while you do it. So thank you to Vadim Vladimirskiy, Joseph Landes, Bryan Law, and Kaitlyn Ethier for making that real, and for believing in our team. As for how I feel about this team... 👇
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Sophie Buonassisi reacted on thisSophie Buonassisi reacted on thisMost AI conversations in marketing are still about producing more: more content, more ad variations, and more landing pages. Meagen, CMO of Samsara, described something different on GTMnow Podcast. When Sophie asked her what the future of marketing looks like, she described a morning that doesn't start with a dashboard review and a team huddle. It starts with a note from an agent: 1/ A segment was low on pipeline overnight. 2/ Campaigns have gone live. 3/ Budget has been moved over from where there was a surplus. That changes what a marketer's morning looks like. You're no longer deciding what to run - you're reviewing what has already run. It also raises a question most teams haven't answered yet: what is an agent allowed to do without asking? Someone has to set the limits, such as which segments it can touch, how much it can spend, when a human must approve action, and who owns the agent when the person who built it leaves. Meagan shared that her team plans governance and compliance around the agents they build. For B2B marketing leaders, that's the real prep work for this future. It isn't just giving agents access to the dashboard, past results, and the budget; it's writing down the rules they work within. The leader who sets those rules well will get far more from an agent working overnight than the one who simply switched it on.
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Sophie Buonassisi reacted on thisA big congratulations to Andy White, Ph.D., Weston Conway and the entire Closinglock team! Closinglock, a GTMfund portfolio company, has been acquired by CertifID. 💥Sophie Buonassisi reacted on thisClosinglock has been acquired by CertifID! Ten years ago, we started with one idea: help title companies stop email spoofing. That idea grew into leading fraud prevention technology, workflow management, and the industry's first good funds-compliant digital cash-to-close payment. Today, it becomes part of something bigger. Together with CertifID and CloseSimple, we're building one connected platform that protects the entire closing and makes it simpler and better for title professionals and the buyers and sellers they serve. For our customers, everything you rely on stays right where it is. Same product, same team, same support. Our founder Andy White, is joining CertifID as Chief Strategy Officer, and he's teaming up with Tyler Adams and Paul Stine for a live webinar on October 8 at 12 PM ET to share what's next. Save your seat: https://lnkd.in/g_baPvGS We started Closinglock because we believed this industry deserved better. Now we get to deliver more of it. 🔗 Read the press release: https://lnkd.in/gynTgz3P
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Sophie Buonassisi reacted on thisSophie Buonassisi reacted on thisClosinglock has been acquired by CertifID! Ten years ago, we started with one idea: help title companies stop email spoofing. That idea grew into leading fraud prevention technology, workflow management, and the industry's first good funds-compliant digital cash-to-close payment. Today, it becomes part of something bigger. Together with CertifID and CloseSimple, we're building one connected platform that protects the entire closing and makes it simpler and better for title professionals and the buyers and sellers they serve. For our customers, everything you rely on stays right where it is. Same product, same team, same support. Our founder Andy White, is joining CertifID as Chief Strategy Officer, and he's teaming up with Tyler Adams and Paul Stine for a live webinar on October 8 at 12 PM ET to share what's next. Save your seat: https://lnkd.in/g_baPvGS We started Closinglock because we believed this industry deserved better. Now we get to deliver more of it. 🔗 Read the press release: https://lnkd.in/gynTgz3P
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Sophie Buonassisi reacted on thisSophie Buonassisi reacted on thisAfter 3.5 years of the most meaningful chapter of my career, I’ve decided to end my time with Capsule. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities I’ve had here and proud of what I’ve built, including: ✅ Working directly with the CEO and Head of Sales to define our ICP, positioning, and messaging and build the pipeline and revenue to get us to our Series A ✅ Building a B2B influencer program (before it was cool!) that helped get our brand on the map ✅ Building a VIP dinner program (also before it was cool!) that became our most important channel for pipeline and revenue ✅ Finding, hiring, and working with Whitney McDonald, who has grown that 👆 dinner series into an events + community program that is truly the envy of all other brands’ events + community programs ✅ Launching 8 major product campaigns that drove millions of impressions and became the gold standard for product launch videos ✅ Getting extremely comfortable with podcast guesting, public speaking, recording product-demo and talking-head videos, MCing virtual and IRL events, and presenting to the board each quarter ✅ Building all sorts of things with Claude, including an internal LinkedIn competition app that 4Xed our non-exec impressions, and helping migrate our entire website onto Claude Code ✅ Planning two full-company offsites and building the company culture I wanted at work: fun, connected, and purposeful. This has been one of the hardest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had, and it feels good to have given it my all. An enormous thank you to everyone I worked with over the years, but most especially Champ Bennett and Joseph Jorgensen, Davis Treybig and Brett Wilson, the OG sales team Justin Nychay and Harriet Jopling, the queen of events Whitney McDonald, the wizard and my friend who got me this job Clarke Blackham, a slew of outrageously talented designers like Jonathan O'Brien, Greg Ball, Atley Kasky, and Joel Speasmaker, a cast of incredible contractors and creators, and many more. I will always be cheering on team Capsule. As for what’s next, I’m taking a little time off. But after I’ve spent some time writing, catching up on house and landscaping projects, being more present with my kids and partner, marketing our pizza popup business, and finally getting back to ballet class— I’ll be looking to join a later-stage B2B tech company, either as a senior IC or to build a new function within the broader marketing org. I’m particularly interested in product marketing, brand, or editorial-focused roles at companies with exceptional marketing leadership. But I’m also staying pretty open as I figure out what’s next. If you think there could be a good fit, or you just want to catch up, send me a DM. btw just built a brand-new, WIP portfolio with Claude Code/Vercel, linked on my profile 👀
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Board Member
Room to Read
- 12 years
Education
Member of the Vancouver Board planning, coordination, and execution of projects and events to raise funds and educate the public on Room to Read’s mission, which has contributed to the 16.6 million children who have benefited from the non-profit organization.
http://www.roomtoread.org/ -
Academic Learning Coach
Simon Fraser University
Education
Provided mentorship and support to student-athletes, helping individuals with their time-management skills, course planning, and writing abilities.
Honors & Awards
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NCAA GNAC Soccer Academic All-Conference Team
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Recognition for joint academic and athletic excellence.
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Simon Fraser University Athletic Scholarship- NCAA DII Women's Soccer
Simon Fraser University
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Simon Fraser University Dean's Honour Roll
Simon Fraser University
Languages
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French
Professional working proficiency
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
Recommendations received
2 people have recommended Sophie
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