Episode #304:
Keith Laska, Chief Growth Officer at GridUnity, explores the leadership principles driving sustainable growth amid an unprecedented AI transformation. He explains why executive alignment, customer obsession, and trust remain foundational growth drivers despite rapid technological change. Keith shares practical strategies for developing stronger customer relationships and preparing teams for AI-enabled operations. He also outlines why organizations that combine human insight with AI orchestration will create lasting competitive advantages.
“You’re not at risk of being automated by AI. You’re at risk of somebody who understands AI better than you orchestrating it. Those that actually learn how to orchestrate that new technology and harness that new technology end up in a very strong place in the future.” – Keith Laska
In this conversation, Keith shares practical lessons from decades of leadership across AI, SaaS, revenue, and growth organizations. He discusses how executive alignment accelerates performance, why voice-of-customer programs create sustainable advantages, and how trust drives stronger business relationships. Keith also explains why AI orchestration, not AI experimentation alone, will separate future market leaders from everyone else.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a super interesting conversation with Keith Laska. Now, Keith, you’re the Chief Growth Officer at GridUnity, and that just starts to describe your background and what you’re doing. You’re not only overseeing all of marketing, all of sales, and all of customer success, but you’ve also been a CEO of an organization multiple times.
[00:00:32] Steve MacDonald: So, needless to say, you’ve been in all the positions where the buck stops with you in terms of revenue, growth, and accountability to the board. You’ve also traveled throughout the world. You’ve lived in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. You’ve gained different perspectives from your global experiences.
[00:00:54] Steve MacDonald: You’ve been at the forefront of AI for a long time. I’d love to hear a little more about your background, and then we’ll jump right in.
[00:01:03] Keith Laska: Absolutely. Thanks so much for inviting me to the podcast, Steve. I do listen intently to all your pods. I’m amazed that I’m actually here and able to experience it from this side. So, thanks for the invitation. Just a bit of background on me. I’ve been an enterprise AI SaaS executive for just over two decades. I actually started my career as a professor of French and Italian, which has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise SaaS and AI. I realize that.
[00:01:30] Keith Laska: I also teach today, as well, over at Fordham University. So I started at Phillips Exeter Academy and now teach at Fordham University as an adjunct. In between, I spent a lot of time working with a variety of types of businesses and traveling the world. I lived and worked for almost a decade across Europe and Asia. I’ve moved around an awful lot. I’ve got a beautiful family that’s now growing up and taking flight. It’s been quite a ride.
[00:01:59] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I’d love to do, because one of the very first things that you and I talked about is how we need alignment, and it needs to be bulletproof. A lot of us talk about alignment. We know that there’s no alignment sometimes, all the way down to our own definition of the ICP within our organization. By the way, this is the number one challenge in B2B today. I ask a question about what the top two challenges are to every C-suite executive who comes on. By far, this is the number one. I’ve had a number of people at go-to-market consulting firms confirm it. This is the biggie. Why is it important, in your terms, and then how do you bulletproof internal alignment?
[00:02:46] Keith Laska: It’s a great question. I work at a phenomenal company called GridUnity, a leader in interconnection and grid planning, really on the precipice of the dynamic changes happening in AI, data centers, and energy consumption. We have a similar makeup to a lot of other companies that are VC-backed, PE-backed, or founder-led. It’s all about alignment.
[00:03:06] Keith Laska: Ultimately, I think one of the first objectives you have as a Chief Growth Officer is to ensure 100% alignment with the board, your CEO, and the executive team on the direction that everyone believes we’ve got to go in as a company. The other thing is that Chief Growth Officers and Chief Revenue Officers were, by nature, personalities. We’re relationship experts. But we also sometimes tend to believe that all our priorities are the only ones.
[00:03:35] Keith Laska: I think executive alignment means understanding that the other executives who are coming to the table also have priorities. They also have goals. They also have objectives. So finding the cross-functional seams between your objectives and theirs will propagate and accelerate the goals you have as a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Growth Officer.
[00:03:55] Steve MacDonald: You started to answer the question there. But here’s kind of a broader question. We all know we have this as a problem. We even talk about it and can agree in a meeting, but then what actually happens, right? I wouldn’t be any different if all my compensation were based on the number I was going to hit this quarter, and there was a deal that maybe didn’t quite fit our ICP but would really help us hit a revenue number.
[00:04:23] Steve MacDonald: Even though, in the long term, we’re probably going to churn that client. It’s not right. We’re just going to have a hard time servicing it. But it’s what we do because it’s how we’re compensated. How do we act in alignment rather than just talk about it?
[00:04:38] Keith Laska: Such a good question, and it leads to balancing short-term and long-term goals as well. If you think about an executive team, they have varying lenses on their objectives. If you’re in sales, you’re looking within the quarter, within the half year, and within the year. If you’re a really good Chief Revenue Officer or a really good Chief Growth Officer, 50% of your focus should be on the current year, and 50% on the following year. If you think about that level of focus amongst the executive team, that will align you in different ways.
[00:05:13] Keith Laska: So I’m aligned at my peer level within the year, but then I’m aligned with the Chief Product Officer for next year. I’m also aligned with engineering and the CTO, for example, about ensuring that we’ve got high-quality code output, high levels of customer satisfaction, and low bug rates. All of that kind of stuff really depends on variables throughout the year. You need to understand what your peers are being measured against and what the company ultimately considers success.
[00:05:44] Steve MacDonald: I know one of the things that we talked about before was an absolute focus on the voice of the customer. We all know it’s our North Star. There’s not one of us who would say, “We’re not customer-obsessed.” We’re not customer-focused. We all say we are. But I recently came across a Forrester study from just a couple of years ago that said only 3% of B2B companies were deemed truly customer-obsessed. Sure. And if you were customer-obsessed, I think it was about 41% higher revenue, 49% higher profitability, and 51% lower churn. The impact on revenue and NRR is unbelievable, right? So why aren’t we obsessed with the customer?
[00:06:34] Keith Laska: It’s a great question. I think in organizations where you’ve got challenges balancing the urgent and the important, you’re constantly sacrificing your long-term growth for short-term gain. The way I’ve always looked at it is an account executive, from a sales perspective, is responsible for the quarter. The Director or VP of Sales is responsible for the current year, and the Chief Growth Officer should be responsible for the next two years.
[00:07:06] Keith Laska: I think if you have misalignment there, you’ve got a real problem in your overall growth strategy because you’re constantly sacrificing long-term growth for short-term gain. One way to bridge that gap for a revenue leader is to initiate a Voice of Customer program. And sometimes, when you speak with salespeople, they don’t understand why they should be spending their time speaking with a customer about a product or service that might not launch for another 12 or 18 months.
[00:07:36] Keith Laska: But actually, you should be thinking of your future self as an account executive, as a sales director. I’m okay now. I’m closing my book of business now. The company’s happy now. But what’s going to happen to my future self a year from now if I don’t conduct a number of Voice of Customer calls to validate future product direction?
[00:07:55] Keith Laska: In addition to helping customers by being really customer-focused and customer-obsessed, and helping your peers, the product owners, solution owners, product managers, and CPO, to help feed their pipeline, you ultimately satisfy multiple objectives you have for a customer. And by the way, you feel a little less salesy in front of the customer if you’re actually asking them what problems you could solve for them in the future.
[00:08:21] Steve MacDonald: So you bring up an interesting area on why talk to customers about future products and things. Salespeople talk to buyers who become customers every single day, so it was interesting. I had a conversation with a gentleman who’s a four-time B2B CRO, and he said, “Steve, when I talk about talking more to customers, I want to accentuate this point. I mean outside of the sales process.” And I’d love to just ask, do you agree with that? There obviously is a tremendous amount of learning within the sales process we have. But there’s a different set of learning when it’s not in a pitch environment, it’s not a sales environment, it’s not where the buyer has their cards close to their chest, right? And they’re looking like this, and they’re trying not to reveal. They’re trying to glean what they can from you.
[00:09:12] Keith Laska: Yeah, absolutely. And we deploy this a lot at GridUnity. We call ourselves intellectually curious, and I’ve carried that through every organization I’ve been in. If you’re a salesperson or in a revenue role and you’re truly curious about your conversations, you are not asking yes-or-no questions. You’re not trying to get an immediate outcome from a situation, but you’re truly trying to understand what kind of pain a customer has and translate that into long-term value. In my experience over the past couple of decades, the sales executives who get that and understand that grow the fastest.
[00:09:49] Keith Laska: They get promoted the quickest because they’re doing something as simple as this, not thinking just about themselves and their own role, but thinking about the company and the goals the company has long term. It seems so natural, but those who can accomplish that really do go far in business.
[00:10:09] Steve MacDonald: Now, how do you train for that? You’re in charge of sales, right? So this intellectual curiosity, how does that actually make it into what you train and what the salespeople actually do?
[00:10:21] Keith Laska: Absolutely. Great question. It’s first-principles thinking. You might call it the original why. If you’re in a conversation and a customer or prospect says, “This is the reason we’re doing things this way,” ask why.
[00:10:35] Keith Laska: And instead of saying, “Oh, that’s interesting, and I’ll take a note,” you ask why. And they say, “That’s because my boss told me that.” Why did your boss tell you that? If you follow first-principles thinking on finding the why, the original why, you expose a brand-new world of information that can be extremely helpful to both the customer and to your organization. So get rid of the yes-or-no questions, get rid of the short-term close, and be intellectually curious about the problems you’re solving with customers, and I guarantee you’ll go far.
[00:11:09] Steve MacDonald: So, that leads to another question, because you could call what you’re saying there what Forrester and Gartner would say. You’ve got to be a trusted advisor, not a seller, right? Not somebody representing an organization that’s trying to make a sale. You’re trying to be, I would say, and I love this kind of, I forget who said this, but transition even beyond trusted advisor to peer or colleague, because you’re so interested. And you, as a salesperson, talk to way more of their peers than they do most of the time, right?
[00:11:43] Steve MacDonald: You have learned from talking to the peer group that they don’t even have. Is that kind of, whether you call it a trusted advisor, a peer, or a colleague, an important part of establishing that relationship? Not asking that yes-or-no question, not putting a timeline on it, right? Not trying to BANT qualify everybody immediately, you know?
[00:12:06] Keith Laska: It’s interesting to see, when new account executives are onboard, and new salespeople are onboard, who can establish relationships quickly and who finds it a little bit more painful. The hack on sales and revenue strategy, in my mind, over the past couple of decades, is to understand the person you’re trying to solve problems for more than the problem itself on the first occasion.
[00:12:30] Keith Laska: So, when I go out, and I meet people, they are people as well. They have children, they have lives, they have recreational habits. Whatever they’re doing, it’s really important for anyone in a relationship to try to understand the other person and truly care about them as well.
[00:12:49] Keith Laska: When you establish that base relationship, you have what I call sand in the fishbowl, in terms of understanding how they operate. Then that trust factor builds and continues to grow. And without trust, particularly with large enterprise deals, you just don’t have a company that can operate effectively.
[00:13:08] Steve MacDonald: And so, that’s an interesting thing, trust. Because in an ABM model, it’s all about, and we know in B2B, overall, it’s all about relationships, right? And especially in an ABM model, it’s not about saying, “Oh, look at those intent signals. Wow, let’s go after them.” It’s, “Here are the companies that we’re going to grow with.
[00:13:29] Steve MacDonald: Let’s start the relationship. Let’s begin,” right? And then when they get into an RFP, or they get into that buying cycle, we’re known, and we’re trusted. How does that work into a quota-based system? Building relationships over time, nurturing those relationships that, back to BANT, aren’t BANT-qualified at the beginning, but are the perfect people we want to have those relationships with.
[00:13:57] Keith Laska: So, how do you establish and grow trust within these accounts, particularly in ABM and larger-scale enterprise opportunities, knowing that there might not be an initial deal right in front of you at that moment? Ultimately, if you believe in your company and you believe in your product, the delta, the asymmetry, is being able to effectively translate what solutions you provide to that customer. Then it becomes a temporal question of when they might understand that, or when the company’s dynamics might be right for them to actually take the next step.
[00:14:33] Keith Laska: There are a multitude of things you can do in a discovery, sales, or relationship management process to continue to build trust, but also expose some of the benefits of your platform or services relative to the issues and the pain that the customer has. If you can’t identify pain and try to solve it with the medicine your company provides, you’re going to have consistent issues translating your company’s value to the market.
[00:15:00] Steve MacDonald: A lot of times, we talk to people who have been living with the pain for a long time. And the longer that we live with the pain, the more that we deprioritize it. We’ve been living with it so long, it’s just the way that it is. Especially in a SaaS model, it’s, “Oh, that sounds really great. We’re doing okay right now. That would probably require us to involve procurement. We’d have to retrain a bunch of people, and I think we’re just pretty good for now. We’ve been living with this. We’ll be all right.”
[00:15:27] Steve MacDonald: You know?
[00:15:27] Keith Laska: The pain of doing nothing, right?
[00:15:30] Steve MacDonald: Yes. Yes.
[00:15:31] Keith Laska: A lot of customers across a lot of industries are struggling with the “Do I get off the couch?” kind of issue. I know things aren’t great. I know we’ve got challenges and problems, but I’m already busy enough. So, if I have to pick up a new project and try to learn a new piece of software or learn a new process, it’s very painful for me to do. I think in those situations, you have to expose them to the level of pain that actually exists, and you can do that through various tools.
[00:16:00] Keith Laska: You’ve got case studies and testimonials. You have ROI analyses and business case documentation you can put together. Peer meetings with others in a similar industry who’ve had challenges, selected your product or service, and now want to explain how that worked for your new prospect. But it’s about taking a journey with them rather than selling to them. That’s the critical part of wrapping this all up into establishing trust, identifying pain, and taking a journey with your customer, as opposed to trying to find a specific end date.
[00:16:37] Steve MacDonald: You know, that journey is a trust-building journey, and you brought that up. In our last conversation, you also talked about internal trust challenges and equated them with preparing teams for an AI transformation era. So, I’d love to hear about that.
[00:16:57] Keith Laska: Across all my conversations in all industries, with multiple friends, colleagues, and connections, one thing is clear. Some people are very excited about AI, but many are afraid of it. We have interviews and conversations with prospective employees in which they are understandably concerned that their job might be automated by AI, and that comes out in initial conversations. And our response has been pretty simple. You’re not at risk of being automated by AI.
[00:17:28] Keith Laska: You’re at risk of somebody who understands AI better than you orchestrating it. That’s a really important differentiated point. I have been in industries disrupted by AI before this chasm-crossing, and what I’ve seen is that those industries explode in value and opportunity. But those who actually learn to orchestrate and harness that new technology end up in a very strong position in the future.
[00:17:55] Keith Laska: So, my advice to anybody listening to your podcast or watching this is dive in deep. As we speak, I’ve got Claude Code running through the terminal on my desktop. I’m a revenue guy, right? But I’m coding, and I’m learning how to adapt to a new world, and I think everybody has a responsibility to do the same.
[00:18:14] Steve MacDonald: Isn’t it great? In some ways, I created an app on Claude last week, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I did that.” But here’s something that’s interesting. When you talk about them being worried about losing their jobs, there’s another dynamic: a lot of people are looking at AI as something that’s going to make us more efficient.
[00:18:38] Steve MacDonald: But the vast majority of the companies that we’re selling to are, yes, expecting us to do things quicker and faster, but they’re expecting more value out of what we produce, more value in less time. And so, AI isn’t just about how do we do things quicker and faster, but how do [00:19:00] we elevate the value that we’re providing to them? Because yesterday’s expectations are not what today’s expectations are. Across the go-to-market teams, how do you talk about that differential in value that the expectation is setting?
[00:19:15] Keith Laska: Absolutely. So, first and foremost, you have this kind of polarization across markets and industries. You have companies that are AI-native, running quickly, and demoing really well. You have business users in context saying, “Wow, I really want that.” In the same category, I would put business leaders within enterprise organizations who are also opening up Claude Code and coding their own app, saying, “Why can’t vendors do this quickly?”
[00:19:41] Keith Laska: And then, on the other side, you have more established players who have strong defensive moats. They’ve got access to data. They understand human-in-the-loop processes with AI, and they are quickly building as well. GridUnity is an AI native company, so we’re already leaps and bounds ahead in the market.
[00:19:59] Keith Laska: I think you have this impatience on behalf of customers who use AI at work and then also use AI at home and are expecting that of their vendors. You have to rise to that occasion. You’ve got to move quickly. You’ve got to move aggressively. You have to realize that we are at a pivotal moment. This is probably one of the most transformative moments we, as humans, will experience over the next couple of decades.
[00:20:24] Keith Laska: We should consider ourselves lucky that we’re actually in the middle of this transformation. But you have to rise to that occasion. You’ve got to rise to your customer’s expectations. At the same time, I think the big gap is between creating an app with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any of these other tools and ensuring that the piping is working effectively and in line with your idea.
[00:20:50] Keith Laska: I’m still seeing massive levels of inappropriate prompting, for example, or a lack of AI harnessing, which is effectively using ChatGPT, for example, but integrating Slack, Google Drive, and other systems to be able to work more effectively and efficiently. We’re still at the precipice of this.
[00:21:09] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. You brought up a number of things in there. One thing you talked about is data and the importance of data, and harnessing and putting it all together. I was just reading last week how, I think it was McKinsey, who said that 90% of our data is unstructured data. And Forrester, they said that 70% of people, leaders like us inside of B2B businesses that are looking at AI, think that 70% of the data it’s going to rely on is our structured data, the stuff that’s coming out of our tech stacks. Like, how do we organize our tech stacks?
[00:21:48] Steve MacDonald: But the unstructured, the conversational data, is where real intent lies. Where the real nuggets of truth from our buyers and how they think come together in coordinated, verbalized sentences, much more than a form filled out, a page visited, all of that. So, how do you think about the world of structured versus unstructured data?
[00:22:14] Keith Laska: Yeah. I think a number of years ago, I would’ve pushed harder on structured data over unstructured data, just because I don’t think the systems and the AI tooling were in place to truly understand it. Today, based on what I’m seeing with new models coming out, it’s got a pretty good strike rate for understanding structured data. I think the battleground in the future on AI will probably be large language models, generic large language models, versus highly trained RAG-style smaller models that are industry-specific, that are trained on your particular industry, and that understand you and your content and your customer’s content much better than a hallucinating generic LLM could ever do.
[00:23:00] Keith Laska: I think the underlying issue that will drive that conversation forward is security. I recently saw that a vast majority of companies that are now deploying AI, I think it’s in the range of 80% or higher, have experienced at least one security incident related to AI. If you’re not careful, not only are your organizational membrane, your brain, and your adaptive memory being loaded into these systems, but if you have one leak during this age of exploration, you’re in big trouble. I think that’s going to be the battlefield of the future. It’ll be large, generic models versus small, specific AI engines and LLMs that rule the day.
[00:23:41] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting because the LLMs today, you wouldn’t really think of it this way, but they’re a commodity because everybody has access to the exact same tool. What you’re saying is these kinds of verticalized LLMs are highly trained, not just general market data. They’re highly trained. And I guess the level below that would be: how do we train them on our buyers and our go-to-market? What objections and buyer intelligence do we have that we want our LLM to have? And that’s not always the stuff that’s coming out of the marketing automation tech stack or CRMs. I love how you’re thinking on that and prioritizing it, really, on how we train it on what we do. And nobody else is going to do that for us, right?
[00:24:28] Keith Laska: It’s our defensive moat and a requirement at the same time. I do believe that if you believe that the market is going to move to outcome-based pricing and packaging, for example, for AI models, you’d better train those engines really well because outcome-based pricing highly depends on the outcome that you’re proposing by deploying AI. I think highly trained small models, small language models, are going to be huge. I do think there is a market for larger generic models, maybe a retail market, maybe encroaching into some areas of enterprise business like customer success, where there’s a lot of fluidity in data movement. But I think, for the innards of an enterprise, they might find themselves increasingly moving toward specific models.
[00:25:11] Steve MacDonald: I can only imagine the kind of enterprise customers that you have and the level of expectation on you knowing their business as well as they know their business. You just can’t get there without a deep understanding. In fact, when I asked what the two greatest challenges are for creating long-term sustainable growth, the number-two challenge was a lack of deep understanding of the voice of the customer. Yes. That was number two.
[00:25:36] Keith Laska: Yeah. Absolutely. Could not agree more. At GridUnity, we are all subject matter experts. We consider ourselves stewards and protectors of our customers’ data, and we enable them to gain significant insights and make decisions based on it. I think all companies in the age of AI really need to think hard about their level of differentiation in the market. I think understanding your customers to an infinite level is one of those differentiators and defensive moats.
[00:26:02] Steve MacDonald: You know what’s really interesting? I’d love to get your perspective on this. We’ve been talking about an absolute 100% bulletproof focus on internal alignment, understanding our customers, and building trust early in a relationship. Those have got to be three of the most basic things ever. Go back to Marketing 101 or Sales 101, and bring out the old textbook from 30 years ago. But we’re still dealing with it. Here’s the other thing. Not one of those is an external challenge. Yeah. We have 100% control over all of those. Yes. But we’re still struggling with it. As a former CEO and CGO, running the go-to-market, why? Why are we still struggling so mightily with this?
[00:26:52] Keith Laska: With the concept of trust and building trust across customers?
[00:26:56] Steve MacDonald: All three of those. The internal alignment, yeah. The deep understanding of the customer builds trust. These are like table-stakes kind of stuff. Yeah.
[00:27:04] Keith Laska: It is really about ensuring a cultural environment where people are comfortable speaking their mind and creating a strong environment of transparency and honesty. We both know from childhood that sometimes, when you admit what you’ve done, you get yelled at. Little kids end up asking, “Do I tell my parents that, or do I not tell my parents that?” What happens, unfortunately, as humans, is that you learn positive and negative reinforcement loops.
[00:27:33] Keith Laska: An organizational culture that allows you to be open about your views, that allows you to make mistakes in public, and that allows you to learn from those in a healthy and supportive environment, those are companies, time and time again, just look across the list of companies that have been super successful. Those are the ingredients.
[00:27:56] Steve MacDonald: That’s a whole other episode because, again, that’s another thing that we can control, our own company culture, how we treat our employees, the kind of psychological safety that they can operate within. That they feel like they can innovate and be a part of it and fail, and that’s a part of the process that’s accepted. So important.
[00:28:15] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, we’ve covered so much territory here. Yeah. I don’t want to stop, but I want to ask you one last question, and that is, if there was one thing that you wanted the other C-suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast, one thing to take away, what would that be?
[00:28:33] Keith Laska: I would suggest that executives look into deploying AI orchestrators into every part of their organization. It is a role that’s been discussed. Many companies have talked about an AI orchestration lead or a chief AI officer. What I’m seeing when I have conversations with friends and colleagues across multiple industries, again, is that there’s a period of experimentation taking place in the markets.
[00:29:02] Keith Laska: As people are trying to become faster and trying to become quicker, they are experimenting, but they’re experimenting in silos. We’ve got a lot of internal coordination at the company I work for on AI, so we can see the overlap between various processes and the AI processes people are deploying, and we can nail that overlap and remove it.
[00:29:21] Keith Laska: For this period of transformation in AI, there needs to be streamlined, centralized orchestration of AI to take you from the experiment phase to the ROI phase. And then, of course, your GTM operators need to be AI-enabled. If you interview them, if you speak to them, have them show you the tooling that they’ve built, as long as it’s able to be shown or at least demoed in some generic form. You don’t want to break any rules. But make sure they show you what they’ve built, not just talk about AI.
[00:29:50] Steve MacDonald: So important because the impact of AI has been demonstrated to impact revenue. Understanding the voice of the customer significantly impacts revenue. Customer obsession significantly impacts revenue. Building trust, internal alignment. Every single one of those has separate individual studies by the Forresters and McKinseys of the world that all collectively say, “If we do this right, then we’re going to grow our businesses.”
[00:30:18] Steve MacDonald: AI is right on top of that heap. Boy, Keith, I got to tell you, I love this conversation. And the mission of this whole podcast is to bring together different perspectives and different voices from around the world, across the C-suite. If there’s even one thing that we can all take away from every conversation, I think you had about five that we take away from this conversation. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on today.
[00:30:41] Keith Laska: Thanks. Thanks as well. Thanks for the invitation. Really appreciate these pods and excited to be a part of it. Thanks again.