Hey {{first_name}} ,
Most career advice assumes the role you want already exists and someone else is currently doing it. Learn the skills, wait for the seat, step into the shape.
That assumption is breaking. The roles being created around revenue right now - the AI transformation seats, the agentic selling mandates, the enablement functions suddenly asked to own a number they've never owned, mostly have no predecessors. Nobody's job description is being inherited.
This issue is about what that requires, from someone who has done it more than once on purpose
In this one:
The Feature: Stephanie Benavidez on saying yes to the blank page
The Signal: Three roles being redefined, and what each is now accountable for
The Workflow: The charter conversation, before you build anything
The Skill: Writing a function charter that survives its first reorg
The Prompt: Reading job postings to find where your function is heading
Sreedhar Peddineni,
CEO, GTM Buddy
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THE ACTIVATOR
Say Yes to the Blank Page
Seventh spotlight in the Wednesday Women × GTM Buddy Revenue Activators series
Stephanie has spent twenty years building revenue operations and sales enablement functions from scratch. Not inheriting them. Building them.
Her advice to anyone earlier in a career is one line: say yes to the blank page.
The expansion is where it gets useful. Early on, she says, it's tempting to seek out established companies with structured programmes and clear ladders — and there's real value in that. But if you ever get the chance to be the first person in a role, take it. Build the thing. Name it. Own it.
Why a blank page teaches something a defined role can't
Her argument for this isn't romantic. It's mechanical.
Building from scratch, she says, forces you to develop judgment rather than execution. You have to decide what matters, defend your choices, and iterate in public. That compounds in a way that following someone else's system simply doesn't.
Sit with the three verbs, because they're the whole thing.
Decide what matters. In a defined role this has been done for you. Someone chose the priorities and your job is delivery against them. On a blank page you have to choose - which means being wrong sometimes, visibly.
Defend your choices. A defined role comes with borrowed authority; you can point at the plan. A new function has none. Everything gets questioned, and you learn to argue for things rather than cite them.
Iterate in public. No pilot phase, no cover. The first version of whatever you build is the version everyone sees, and the second arrives with everyone knowing the first wasn't right.
An uncomfortable list. Also, precisely, the skill set an undefined role demands - and there are a lot of undefined roles arriving at once.
The part most people find out too late
There's a second benefit she names that's easy to skim past.
You discover whether you're energised by ambiguity or exhausted by it. And - this is the important bit - either answer is useful. Knowing it early saves years.
That deserves more weight than career advice usually gives it. A great deal of professional unhappiness comes from people who thrive on structure being pushed toward founding roles because founding roles carry more status, or from people who thrive on ambiguity being kept inside processes that quietly grind them down. Neither is a talent problem. Both are placement problems, and both take years to diagnose from the inside.
The leaders she most admires, she says, didn't inherit their functions. They built the floor everyone else now stands on.
Where the instinct came from
Stephanie's answer to what she'd give a TED talk about is the best thing in our whole submission pile, and it isn't about enablement at all.
Her title: Everyone Should Work a Table.
Before she ever sat in a boardroom she was ringing up lumber at a hardwood store, waiting tables on Friday nights, teaching dance to six-year-olds, picking up shifts on a farm, babysitting to fill the gaps. She didn't know it then, but she was in school.
Her case is that the service industry is one of the most underrated leadership training grounds that exists - and that our collective dismissal of it costs organisations deeply. The skills she relies on daily are reading a room, recovering from a mistake in real time, earning trust face to face, making someone feel genuinely cared for. None were learned in a classroom. They were learned on a shift.
Service workers develop emotional intelligence, composure under pressure and relationship instincts every day, without a single workshop. These are the skills that look soft on a CV and prove hardest to teach once someone is already in a leadership seat.
The room she most wants to give that talk to: the one full of high achievers who've forgotten where they learned to hustle.
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Rapid fire
What she'd tell someone starting out
Say yes to the blank page, and don't wait for permission. If you get a chance to lay some floor, even if it's messy, even if it's early, start building.
Something people wouldn't guess
At eleven, she performed on Broadway in Chicago for twenty-six weeks in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She sang at Carnegie Hall at seventeen. She danced competitively for most of her life.
Which, on reflection, is the same argument as the TED talk. Composure under pressure, reading a room, delivering while people watch - she'd been practising the leadership skills since before she had a job title. She just didn't call it that at the time.
Stephanie’s POV on what enablement isn't
Everyone should work a table.
That is where the real skills are learned.
Follow Stephanie Benavidez
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Wednesday Women feature post
THE SIGNAL
Three roles are being redefined. Nobody has told the people in them.
Watch the titles appearing on LinkedIn over the past year. Senior Director of Agentic Selling. Head of AI Sales Transformation. GTM Transformation Lead. Two years ago these didn't exist in any meaningful number.
What's notable isn't the vocabulary. It's that these are budgeted seats with executive mandates and no predecessors — blank pages, being handed out at scale.
Sreedhar Peddineni argued in Forbes recently that the redefinition runs deeper than new titles, and reaches roles that already exist. His version, condensed:
The CRO becomes a capacity architect
When headcount was the only instrument for adding revenue capacity, the CRO's job was largely hiring and territory design. Once capacity can be added without adding people, the job becomes designing systems that maximise yield per seller.
Enablement becomes activation
From producing content and programmes to influencing deal-level outcomes. The function stops being measured on what it published and starts being measured on what moved.
The manager becomes a pit crew chief
Intervening on live deals rather than reviewing dead ones. Coaching that arrives during the race rather than in the post-mortem.
Why this reaches you:
These aren't gentle evolutions. Each changes what the person is accountable for, and in most organisations nobody has said so out loud. The job description didn't change. The comp plan didn't change. The expectations quietly did.
Which is a blank page arriving without anyone acknowledging it's a blank page - the hardest version, because you get the ambiguity of a founding role with none of the licence.
The practical read
If your function's expectations have shifted and the charter hasn't, you're already building on a blank page. The only question is whether you name it and get it agreed, or absorb it silently and get judged against a standard nobody wrote down.
That's what the rest of this issue is for.
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THE WORKFLOW
The charter conversation
Before you build anything in an undefined role, have this conversation. Sixty minutes, with whoever your work will ultimately be judged by.
Who's in the room
You and your executive sponsor. Not your manager, unless they're the same person. The person who will one day be asked, in a budget meeting you're not in, whether your function was worth it.
STEP 1 · Ask what problem you were hired to solve: Then stop talking. The answer is frequently different from the job description and occasionally different from what you were told at interview. Write down their words, not your interpretation of them.
STEP 2 · Ask what it looks like if it works: Push for something observable. "Better enablement" is not observable. "New reps close their first deal a month sooner" is. If they can't get specific, that's the finding - the standard is unwritten, and you now get to propose it.
STEP 3 · Propose the number: One measure, attributable to your function, that you'll be judged on. Say it out loud and make them agree or disagree. This is the uncomfortable part and it's the entire point of the meeting: an agreed measure is the difference between a function that can defend itself and one that can't.
STEP 4 · Ask what's explicitly not yours: Undefined roles absorb work by default. Everything nobody else owns drifts toward whoever seems willing. Naming three things that are not yours, in the first conversation, saves a year of drift.
STEP 5 · Ask what would make them shut it down: People rarely ask and almost everyone answers. You'll learn more about how you're actually being evaluated from that one answer than from a quarter of observation.
Write it up and send it the same day
Not as minutes - as a proposal in your own words, inviting correction. Silence is agreement, and agreement in writing is the thing you'll want later.
One caution
If your sponsor won't engage with step 3, don't force it. Note it, propose a measure yourself, send it, proceed. An unagreed measure you set publicly still beats no measure - and the refusal is itself information about how much support the function has.
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THE SKILL
Writing a function charter that survives its first reorg
When to use it
In the first ninety days of any new or redefined function. Also useful retroactively, if expectations have shifted and nothing was ever written down.
Why it matters
New functions rarely die from failure. They die from ambiguity - an org change arrives, a new executive asks what this team does, and nobody can answer in one sentence. The charter is the artefact that answers.
The anatomy of one that holds.
One sentence on the problem. Not the activity. "We build training" is an activity. "New reps take too long to reach quota" is a problem. Problems survive reorgs; activities get absorbed.
One measure, named and agreed. Attributable to you, countable, with the sponsor's agreement recorded. If it moves for six reasons and you control one, find the narrower thing you actually own.
A stated timeframe. "Within two quarters" is a commitment. "Over time" is a hedge and reads as one.
Three things explicitly out of scope. The section people cut, and the one that does the most work. It's your defence against drift and your evidence when someone asks why you didn't do something nobody asked you to do.
A named sponsor. Functions without a named executive owner get reassigned to whoever has capacity. Names in documents are surprisingly durable.
A review date. Charters go stale. A date forces the conversation rather than letting the gap widen quietly.
How it fails
The most common failure is a charter written to impress rather than to constrain. If yours claims everything, it defends nothing - the first sceptical executive finds the gap between claim and evidence, and the document loses authority all at once.
Second most common: written, circulated, never opened again. A charter is only useful if you take it into the meetings where scope is being decided.
The uncomfortable version
If your function has existed for two years and can't produce this on one page, the ambiguity has been absorbed rather than resolved. Survivable - and far easier to fix while nobody is asking than during a reorg when everybody is.
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THE PROMPT
Reading job postings to find where your function is heading
Job postings are the most under-used signal available to anyone trying to work out where their role is going. Companies describe roles they're creating far more honestly than roles that already exist, because they're trying to attract someone rather than manage someone.
Gather 20–30 current postings: your own company, five or six peers, and any company whose GTM organisation you consider a step ahead of yours. Search revenue enablement, GTM enablement, revenue operations, sales transformation, and any AI-plus-sales title you come across.
Analyse these job postings for roles in and around revenue enablement, revenue operations and go-to-market transformation.
I'm not looking for salary benchmarks or a skills list.
Tell me:
Which responsibilities appear here that would NOT have appeared in equivalent postings two years ago
Which responsibilities are moving between functions - anything appearing under one function in some postings and a different function in others
What each role is described as accountable for in outcome terms, and how specific that accountability is
Any titles that appear which have no obvious predecessor role
For each finding, quote the posting language rather than paraphrasing, and note how many postings it appears in.
Why the second question matters most
Responsibilities moving between functions is the clearest early signal of organisational boundaries being redrawn. If something currently sitting in your team appears under RevOps in three peer postings, there's a conversation heading toward you. Better to have it deliberately than to receive it.
And the fourth.
Titles without predecessors are blank pages being created in public. If a role exists at three peers and not at yours, either you're behind or it's about to be created — and the person best placed to shape it is whoever noticed first.
What to do with it
Findings one and three go into the charter conversation. Finding two goes to your peers in the affected functions, before it becomes a territory problem. Finding four goes to your sponsor, with a view attached.
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Three external links worth your time this week.
1. Why the C-Suite Is Funding an AI Transformation It Can’t Define
I wrote this piece for Forbes about a problem emerging across nearly every leadership team: AI transformation has a budget, but no shared definition of what it should accomplish. The better question isn’t, “What AI tools should we buy?” It’s, “What work should our people stop carrying and what capacity should that create?”
2. Every Category Needs a Unit Someone Can Own
A category succeeds when its promise, problem, owner, and budget align around something measurable. When the promise expands without ownership or budget moving with it, accountability breaks down. Enduring categories solve this with a clear unit that one person can own and defend. For Revenue Activation, that unit is Revenue Capacity per Rep.
3. The Bessemer State of the Cloud benchmarks
The Bessemer State of the Cloud benchmarks on Revenue Per Employee are the cleanest external context for mid-year planning conversations. The widening gap between AI-native and AI-augmented operators is showing up in efficiency ratios, not growth rates, and the gap is now meaningfully larger than it was at the start of the year. That’s the data point worth bringing into your board conversation for H2.
Got something we should signal in issue 8? Reply with it.
We read everything.
The one to sit with
You'll discover whether you're energised by ambiguity or exhausted by it. Either answer is useful. Knowing it early saves years.
A lot of people are about to find out. The roles arriving around revenue right now come with mandate and budget and very little definition, and the honest thing to say is that this suits some people enormously and costs others a great deal.
Worth knowing which you are before you say yes. And worth knowing the answer isn't a verdict on your ability - it's information about where you'll do your best work.
Thanks to Stephanie for this one
She's on LinkedIn writing about coaching, community and building things that didn't exist - and is, as far as we know, the only person in revenue enablement holding both a Carnegie Hall credit and a twenty-year record of founding functions from nothing.
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That's issue Seven.
Undefined roles are where careers either compound quickly or disappear into ambiguity. We tried to make this issue as operationally honest as possible: the blank page can build judgment, authority and range, but only if you define the problem, the measure and the boundaries before other people define them for you.
Reply and tell me what landed and what missed. Specifically: if you run the charter conversation, tell me which answer surprised you most and whether the role your sponsor described matches the one you thought you were building. That gap is one of the most useful signals a new function can get.
Three things you can do right now:
Book sixty minutes with the executive sponsor who will ultimately judge your function. Ask what problem you own, what success looks like, what is explicitly outside your scope and what would make them shut the function down. Send the proposed charter that same day.
Take the Revenue Activation Assessment. It diagnoses where your team’s capacity is most constrained across the Five Levers-revenueactivator.ai/assessment.
Follow Stephanie Benavidez on LinkedIn. Her perspective on coaching, community and building functions from a blank page is exactly the read anyone stepping into an undefined revenue mandate needs.
See you in two weeks.
Sreedhar Peddineni
CEO and Co-Founder, GTM Buddy
LinkedIn