Simon Kirk is the interim Chief Revenue Officer at Orbital, the legal AI company for commercial real estate. He spent five years at Culture Amp as global go-to-market VP and the first hire for the company's CRO, building sales development, revenue enablement and solutions consulting into a roughly 70-person function across Australia, the US, the UK and Europe. Before that he worked alongside the CRO at InVision during its scale-up years. For the last two years he has done fractional and interim go-to-market leadership for companies from early-stage, founder-led teams to later-stage scale-ups, stepping in for leadership gaps, leaders who need a senior pair of hands, and important projects without an obvious owner.
“My conclusion wasn't, Claude is the better product, how do we survive? My thinking is there are real areas where specialist products are better suited to a particular use case or workflow.”
“It's less helpful to react emotionally to whatever competitor has just announced something amazing. And it's much more interesting to say and think about, are we actually good at explaining why somebody should choose us?”
“Differentiation isn't just about having a battle card somewhere. You actually have to teach the buyer what to notice, and you have to teach the AE how to teach the buyer what to notice.”
“Frontline managers have to actually reinforce it, because otherwise everything dies at the training session that you held once.”
“The lesson here isn't that AI is just like every other competitor you've ever seen before. It's that some of the underlying sales mechanics are more familiar than people think.”
“If you start to build something in custom code, who is maintaining that? And if that person leaves, what happens to it?”
“You get incredible amounts of credibility with the prospects when you have someone who's sat in their shoes and can really understand what's going on for them.”
“We would sometimes see up to a 10% win rate improvement on SC-covered deals, and that is worth the money many times over.”