Cultural Alignment, Driving Agility and Innovation with Eric Gilpin of G2 

Listen now to hear: 

Eric on collective accountability: “Churn is not a revenue problem. It's not a marketing problem. It's not a product problem. Churn is a company problem. All folks across all different surface areas should be empowered and accountable to help our customers win. That's where people in a CRO role, unfortunately, find a lot of failure because they're not necessarily playing to their cross functional requirements and how companies have to work together to win on behalf of their customers. I think churn is a great example that a lot of B2B companies are feeling right now.” 

Eric on the importance of input metrics and collaboration: “We won't get to 400 sellers, 500 sellers, or 600 sellers without a strong DNA of input metrics because those have to scale. Otherwise, you're not able to see around corners, and you can get ahead of your skis or move too slowly on certain things. You have to lean hard into your RevOps team. You have to lean hard into your partnerships with FP&A. You need to lean hard into your partnerships with the recruiting team so you always have a funnel of candidates.” 

Eric on misunderstanding of the CRO's role: "CROs think that they're the sales leader, whereas they are cross-functional execs that sit at the top of the organization and their job is to communicate and advocate on behalf of their customers and their teams. The only way to do that is to have a shared language. I feel that’s where a lot of CROs miss the next step in their role. It's like, I went from a sales leader to now I'm basically an operator. Now those operations require a ton of unlocks with our partners, but they don't take the time to put themselves in their shoes, and they end up not moving as fast as a team as they could." 

Links and Resources 

About Eric 

Eric Gilpin is Chief Revenue Officer of G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. In this role he oversees all aspects of G2's revenue generation, including global sales and customer success, enablement, partnerships, and revenue operations. An experienced leader with 20+ years of experience building and scaling large technology businesses, Eric joined G2 from Upwork, where he oversaw a global team of 400+ and helped lead the company to a successful IPO in 2018 (NASDAQ:UPWK) where the business scaled to north of $600 million in annual revenue in 2022 while serving 50% of the Fortune 500. Prior to his tenure at Upwork, Eric held a number of leadership roles at CareerBuilder, most recently as President of Vertical Sales. 

Eric also serves as a limited partner at the GTMfund investor network as well as an advisory board member at Sales Assembly. He’s been recognized as one of the Industry's top "40 under 40" by Staffing Industry Analysts in both 2017 and 2018 and as a Top 100 Global Sales Leaders in 2020 by The Modern Sale. Based in Chicago, Eric has a Masters of Business Administration from Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business.