What happens to your Go-To-Market team when AI can do two or three SDRs’ worth of work? When the question isn’t how many people you need, but whether you need people at all?
These are the questions Bethany Ayers is living out loud as CEO of Metomic, and she’s not being subtle about the answers.
As a seasoned CRO who has seen the $1M to $10M journey multiple times, Beth has now stepped into the CEO seat at exactly the moment AI is reshaping everything we thought we knew about building GTM teams.
She’s one of the most direct voices in B2B SaaS leadership, and in this conversation, she challenges some of the industry’s most cherished assumptions, including that Customer Success is a function worth preserving, that marketing should exist as its own silo, and that headcount is still the right unit of measure for GTM capacity.
She also unpacks what it actually looks like to hire 50 AI employees in a quarter, and why she believes a $100M ARR business with 50 people isn’t a pipe dream.
These are some of Beth’s key insights from her conversation on our Making The Grade podcast. You can listen to the full episode here.
Q: When it comes to transitioning away from founder-led sales, what typically goes wrong?
Bethany Ayers: “Founders typically don’t know why they’re winning. They just know when someone else isn’t doing what they did, and they get upset and take over. Very rarely can a founder articulate what makes them successful in a way that someone else can replicate.
In the past, I’d have said hire someone – a Chief of Staff, a Product Marketer, a Strategist, etc., who can sit alongside the founder, observe what’s working and translate it into a repeatable playbook. In 2026, however, I don’t think you necessarily have to hire that role. Instead, record every customer conversation, run it through AI and let it surface the patterns for you. Then you just have to distil that and give it to your next hire as part of their onboarding.”
Q: You're a strong advocate for narrowing the ICP, uncomfortably so, as you put it. What does that actually look like in practice?
Bethany Ayers: “It means committing to a specific firmographic: company size, sector, etc. and then whether they have certain technology, whether there’s a specific persona inside the business without whom you’ll never close the deal.
You might be looking at 500 to 2,000 target customers. That doesn’t feel like a lot, but it enables you to get to know that world really well, and you can build a product for it. Sales hates it, because narrowing feels counterintuitive, and it seems like you’re leaving money on the table, but trust me when I say it works. And when you’re at $2 Million ARR staring at that $10 Million goal, you need to remember that while it doesn’t feel like it now, $10 Million is still a small business, so you have to act accordingly.”
Q: You've said you're not sure Marketing should still exist as a function. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Bethany Ayers: “Demand Generation and ABM absolutely make sense to sit with sales, or with a CRO, at least. Those functions need to feed the pipeline, and they’re too important to be disconnected from revenue accountability.
But brand, thought leadership, or “vibes”, I think a CRO owning that actually kills it. So it’s less that marketing shouldn’t exist, and more that it shouldn’t exist as a monolithic function with a single leader. The question I’d push founders to ask is: Do you need a CMO, or do you need an exceptional brand person and an exceptional growth person? Those are very different hires.”
Q: You're also sceptical about Customer Success. What's your alternative?
Bethany Ayers: “Let’s face it, most Customer Success is just plastering over the cracks of a bad product. If your customers need that level of hand-holding to stay, the problem isn’t CS headcount, it’s the product.
What actually needs to happen is that the Product Leader should share the same KPIs as the CS Leader: gross revenue retention, net revenue retention and NPS. If your product is fundamentally letting customers down, that’s a product problem, so it needs to be owned as such.
For the genuine post-sale work, I’d bring back Professional Services. It’s time-bounded, it’s scoped, it’s a project. Customer success goes on forever, and Account Managers and Support teams can handle the ongoing relationship. In my opinion, that’s a much cleaner model.”
Q: You made headlines with a LinkedIn post about hiring 50 AI employees in a single quarter. What does that actually mean in practice?
Bethany Ayers: It started from an interview on my own podcast, The Operations Room, with a CEO in America who was doing this at a contract management company. I heard it and thought: If he can do it, I can do it.
What it looks like at Metomic is less about autonomous agents and more about trained LLMs that make the team smarter and faster. We have ‘Charlie’ – a CISO persona we’ve built, who reviews every piece of marketing content and tells us, cynically, whenever it sounds like marketing fluff and what we should say instead. We have a CFO persona who challenges our financial thinking. We have one that helps me write my board reports, one that drafts my end-of-week Slack update, and we have a small automation that takes data through to Figma to produce finished datasheets.
On the engineering side, it’s more agentic, and we lost some engineers who weren’t able to adapt to the pace of change. Initially, we were planning to backfill them, but we haven’t, because our engineering productivity is the same as it was with five more people.”
Q: What about AI in GTM specifically? What impact have you seen?
Bethany Ayers: “SDR productivity is the number one impact, and it’s a direct result of a broader principle we operate by at Metomic: AI first, before we hire a person.
The question I’ve put to the team is: What would it take to be a $100M ARR business with just 50 employees? That’s the goal, so every time we consider a hire, we have to be confident that AI genuinely can’t do it and that there’s a real skill missing in the business.
In practice, our SDR is doing the work of two, possibly three SDRs. And the reason is simple, we’ve removed all the busy work. There is so much busy work in an SDR role, but now all they have to do is dial. Pipeline creation, SQO generation, etc. – we’re seeing that level of productivity uplift because everything else has been automated around them.”
