Welcome to GTM Vault, trusted by 25,000+ founders and operators building the future of revenue.
This week’s guest is Rik Schrader, Chief Revenue Officer at GreyOrange.
Rik has spent three decades designing and rebuilding enterprise GTM systems across IBM, NCR, Honeywell, and Körber. He has led SaaS transitions, global enterprise sales teams, partner ecosystems, and revenue transformations where mistakes were expensive and visible.
That background matters because this episode is not about frameworks.
It is about what actually holds up when complexity, scale, and pressure expose weak GTM architecture.
The core question behind this episode is simple and uncomfortable.
What actually scales enterprise revenue when theory stops working and reality shows up?
Inside this episode
Why enterprise revenue fails when systems collapse under complexity
The execution patterns that stay constant across eras and categories
Why activity metrics quietly replace outcomes as teams scale
The hardest GTM transition and why most companies get it wrong
What great CROs deliberately do not change in their first 90 days
How incentives, ownership, and handoffs quietly destroy forecast accuracy
Why partner channels fail when they are performative instead of operational
Where GTM architecture kills growth long before anyone notices
This episode is for founders, CROs, RevOps leaders, and operators running enterprise GTM motions who care more about durability than noise.
We discuss
1:26 Why enterprise revenue fails under complexity
3:58 The execution patterns that actually scale
5:58 Activity vs outcomes - where GTM breaks
7:27 The hardest GTM transition: licensed to SaaS
10:39 The first signals of real revenue health
14:52 What great CROs don’t change in their first 90 days
25:45 Enterprise coverage model mistakes
38:41 What makes partner channels productive
44:18 Why revenue scales on systems, not charisma
Highlights
Enterprise revenue has a systems problem
Most companies do not lose deals because of product.
They lose when incentives, coverage, and cadence drift out of alignment. Complexity compounds. Forecasts miss. Hand-offs leak. The system collapses quietly.
Revenue failure is rarely a data problem.
It is a behavior problem.
Activity is not progress
As organizations scale, dashboards fill up.
Pipeline looks healthier. Activity increases. Meetings multiply.
But outcomes stagnate.
When activity replaces outcomes as the success metric, GTM systems rot from the inside while leadership celebrates the wrong signals.
The SaaS transition breaks culture first
The hardest transition Rik has seen is not hardware plus software or automation.
It is licensed to SaaS.
Subscription models force changes in:
Customer success ownership
Financial metrics and incentives
Executive alignment
Value selling at the rep level
Most organizations only go through this once. Getting it wrong leaves scars that last years.
Great CROs move slower than you think
The biggest mistake first-time CROs make is speed.
They change too much too fast before understanding:
Culture
Maturity
Incentives
Cross-functional dependencies
Great CROs listen first, align second, and only then adjust the system.
Disruption without alignment increases failure probability.
Partner GTM fails when it is theater
Partner ecosystems only work when they are designed as extensions of the core GTM system.
Same rigor.
Same cadence.
Same incentives.
The moment partners live in a different funnel or methodology, forecast accuracy collapses.
Forecast accuracy breaks on incentives, not data
Most CROs blame data.
The real culprit is misaligned incentives.
If top-of-funnel teams are paid for meetings instead of outcomes, the system optimizes for noise. Forecasts fail downstream because behavior was never aligned upstream.
Frameworks and playbooks from the episode
1. The enterprise GTM integrity test
If these are not aligned, scale will fail:
Coverage model
Incentives
Cadence
Ownership across handoffs
Enterprise revenue does not forgive weak links.
2. The first 90-day CRO restraint rule
Do not change:
Coverage models
Forecast rigor
Selling methodology
Until you understand:
Culture
Maturity
Cross-functional dependencies
Diagnosis precedes design.
3. The partner architecture rule
Partners should never operate under:
Different funnel stages
Different cadence
Different success criteria
If they do, they are not partners.
They are noise.
4. The activity detox
Audit your GTM dashboards.
Ask one question:
Which metrics would still matter if incentives disappeared?
Keep those.
Delete the rest.
What you should do this week
Audit where activity has replaced outcomes in your GTM system
Review incentives tied to top-of-funnel behavior
Map ownership across the full customer journey
Identify where handoffs leak accountability
Remove one metric that looks good but drives the wrong behavior
Why this matters for scaling
Enterprise revenue does not scale on charisma.
It scales on systems that survive pressure.
The winners are not louder.
They are clearer.
Clear coverage.
Aligned incentives.
Enforced accountability.
This is GTM Vault.
Build systems, not stress.
If this episode sharpened how you think about enterprise GTM, forward it to one operator responsible for revenue this quarter.
Connect
Follow Rik Schrader: LinkedIn | GreyOrange
Follow Rick Koleta: LinkedIn | RiteGTM
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