Founding GTM Spotlight: Blaise Bevilacqua @ Glue

Introducing our founding GTM series, where we give a voice to early-stage operators building their company’s Go-to-Market motion.

In our inaugural spotlight, we sat down with Blaise, the founding GTM hire at Glue, an AI-powered workplace communication platform taking on giants like Slack and Microsoft Teams. His journey from fashion school to early-stage AI sales offers unique insights into the evolving world of tech sales in the age of AI.

Julian: Fashion School to Teaching to Founding GTM Hire. How did that happen?

Blaise: I had no traditional background. I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) because it was a state school close to home, I could afford the in-state tuition, loved clothing, and thought that was the world I wanted to work in. After college, I taught English in Korea at a small private school. While there, I built up a network of private clients, and one of them happened to be an Enterprise AE from F5 Networks. During our sessions, I'd ask him about his work, and he'd tell these amazing stories about enterprise sales from his 20-year career. I was hooked.

When I moved back to NY, I decided to break into tech sales by making a list of the Cloud Top 100 companies in NY and started applying. I got rejected by 99 of them before Usabilla, a small Dutch start up with a satellite office in NYC, gave me a shot. The hardest part was getting my foot in the door since I had no experience. You’re selling yourself to the hiring manager.

Julian: What drew you to Glue and gave you the confidence to be the first GTM hire?

Blaise: When you join at such an early stage, you’re taking a bet on the people. I did a lot of back channeling, reaching out cold to people who had worked with the team previously. A mentor of mine was helping them on the advising side and his confidence gave me the confidence to join.

On the product side, unlike my prior company UserGems, where we had to create a new category, Glue was competing in an established market. We didn't need to create the budget line item – it was already there.

But you need to have a high tolerance for risk. You need that confidence in yourself and your abilities.

Julian: You come in as the first GTM hire - what was the most unexpected thing about joining at this stage?

Blaise: The sheer amount of processes and systems that needed to be set up. Two things come to mind.

First, was our lack of sales process. I logged into Hubspot and saw 12,000 contacts from our waitlist. I had to figure out how to create a funnel, identify where people should go – SLG versus PLG – and it was all trial and error. I made different funnels, put a few people through them, tried to understand the customer journey, then modified as we went. I revised the funnel 5-6 times trying to find patterns.

Second, at times I feel like I’m more of a Product Manager than Account Executive. All our knowledge lives in Notion, and every week we have design and product calls to discuss customer feedback. It's a constant cycle of creating Linear tickets, ensuring they get pushed to production, and keeping early customers updated on releases. There’s a lot of work we can do here to automate this process.

Julian: How is selling Glue, where there are massive incumbents, different than selling UserGems, where your company created the category?

Blaise: Having incumbents is actually great because there's lots of pain felt. Prospects are very emotional – they come to us like they're visiting a doctor's office. Especially now, with Salesforce's acquisition of Slack and their 40% price increases, there’s lots of opportunity knocking on our door.

One challenge is that Glue impacts the entire organization (not individuals). Timing is critical – when that Slack renewal is coming up, things really pick up. The key is getting people to experience the product. The ‘aha’ moment comes when they see the 10x improvement versus what they're doing now. They can't just hear me talk about it; they need to experience it themselves.

What's fascinating is that C-level leadership is coming to us proactively. They're interested in the AI capabilities and the visibility they get – though we have to be careful about the 'Big Brother' perception.

Julian: You mentioned lack of process. Can you share an example of how you’ve created process where none existed previously?

Blaise: One advantage of selling Glue is that our prospects actually live in Glue, so we don't need to wait for responses. But initially, when people in a trial needed support, it was just emails flying around – no tracking, no prioritization, no measurement. We needed something better.

I worked with my customer success colleague to evaluate several tools – ZenDesk, Pylon, and Plain. Pylon was only based out of Slack channels, but Plain built an integration with Glue that matched our threaded data model. It was exactly what we needed to start measuring and improving our support process.

Julian: How has GTMBA helped you as an early GTM hire?

Blaise: What I love about GTMBA is I feel like I’m on a team again - its a community where you learn from great operators. In past roles, I’d shadow the best people, but as founding GTM, I miss having the team to learn from. Two articles I’ve loved are were the TIPS framework for customer references, and how to build an AI Sales Co-Pilot using Replit.