Why old-school sales work still wins in the AI era | Graham Moreno (Head of GTM, Parallel)

In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Graham Moreno, Head of GTM at Parallel Web Systems. Before Parallel, Graham scaled Windsurf's GTM organization from three sellers to seventy-five in under a year, served as President through the Cognition acquisition, and earlier built and led enterprise sales teams at Grafana Labs and MongoDB. In this conversation, he unpacks why the AI-era backlash against structured enterprise sales misreads the data, how to design a process that raises the floor for ordinary reps without capping the ceiling for stars, and why selling to AI-native customers compresses an eight-week cycle into five business days.

In today's episode, we discuss:

Why in-person enterprise rollouts still beat product-led motions

Building a robust sales process that still leaves room for unscripted moments

Why the three highest-leverage early sales hires aren't sellers at all

The case for outsized commission accelerators for star sellers — and the kind of person they attract

Why most AI companies are skipping the in-person sales work that enterprise customers actually want

References:

Ahead: https://www.ahead.com

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com

Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com

Attio: https://www.attio.com