Ally Combs is Head of GTM Enablement at Bretton AI, the agentic AI platform for financial crime operations, where she is the first enablement hire. She learned enterprise selling at AppDynamics, taking a pay cut and several demotions to restart as a BDR and reaching enterprise account executive in about three years, through the company's $3.7B acquisition by Cisco. She then sold at Snowflake through its IPO before moving into enablement, building ClickUp's GTM enablement function almost from scratch across its $100M to $300M ARR run. She argues that every GTM change lives or dies with the first-line manager, and at Bretton she vibe coded her own LMS, content system, reporting and lead routing on top of Salesforce instead of buying a traditional enablement stack.
“It was probably the best career decision I made in my whole life.”
“The hiring manager who's going to hire you for the next role needs to want you above all else.”
“You end up talking to your one-on-one, to your manager, and you go, "Do I really have to do that?" And in that moment, the change that the business is trying to drive lives or dies.”
“I think the first line sales manager is the hardest job in SaaS, in my opinion, and is one of the most under-invested areas.”
“You're a great manager if your team can operate well without you. Your job is almost to exist to replace yourself and to build up the next generation of leaders.”
“If you recruit great people and you develop them, revenue takes care of itself.”
“If you ever ask a salesperson if they're great, their answer is always that they're the best.”
“You almost have to manufacture a situation that tests for coachability or for character.”