Cello and Lightspeed Announce the Winners of the GTM10 Awards — Honoring the World’s Best GTM Leaders in Software

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cello and Lightspeed Venture Partners today proudly unveiled the 50 winners of the GTM10 Awards 2026, the first global program recognizing the best Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders across Marketing, Sales, Growth, Customer, and Partnerships in software. The winners were selected by an esteemed jury of GTM legends, including Wade Foster (Co-founder & CEO, Zapier), Nadia Rashid (CRO, Outreach), and Keith Messick (CMO, Vercel) - each bringing decades of experience in scaling high-growth software companies.

After reviewing 602 nominations from 28 countries, the jury selected a diverse cohort of leaders redefining what it means to bring technology to market in 2026.

Explore the full list of winners: https://thegtm10.com/winners-2026/

The Five Functions Driving Modern GTM

Each category had its competitive dynamics, with Growth being the most contested, with the highest number of nominations. And the winners were from a wide variety of companies, from Big techs like Klarna, Figma, and Hubspot to Startups and Scaleups like Yoodli, Chargebee, and Clay.

Below are some standout winners from all categories:

• Marketing: Tim Rutten (CMO, Backbase) inherited a broken marketing operation and rebuilt it as an AI-native, full-funnel demand gen engine targeting 50,000 C-suite buyers across 50+ mini go-to-markets. With just 35 FTEs, he drove nearly 10x pipeline growth and lifted marketing's direct contribution to 15–20% of the global corporate pipeline. His proof point: you don't need more resources rather you need a rebuilt operating model with sales and marketing locked onto the same bold vision.
• Sales: Sarah Kiley (CRO, ChurnZero) delivered 121% of bookings target with 38% YoY growth within her first 12 months. Her disciplined restructuring of market segmentation, playbook specialization, and AI-assisted SDR efficiency drove ACV up and set a new standard for what a methodical sales turnaround looks like.
• Growth: Varun Pari (Co-founder & CEO, Yoodli) entered 2025 with a double mandate: define a new category and scale past founder-led management. He repositioned Yoodli as the practice layer of the enterprise learning stack, using "experiential learning" to unlock L&D, enablement, and revenue budgets at once. He also acted on hard feedback that the product wasn't inclusive for all learners, challenging the UX philosophy the company was built on.
• Customer: Ziv Peled (Chief AI and Customer Officer, AppsFlyer) entered 2025 staring down a significant revenue shortfall. He scaled customer success across a large GTM team and built an AI intelligence system, combining CRM data, sales calls, support tickets, and third-party enrichment, into per-account context for every interaction. Renewals held, upsells accelerated, and AppsFlyer hit its annual target anyway. His proof point: great AI output requires great context, and that discipline at scale turned a crisis quarter into a record year.
• Partnerships: Sophia Yang (Head of Developer Relations, Mistral AI) built Mistral's DevRel function from scratch, a four-pillar program spanning enterprise adoption, community, events, and ambassador advocacy that converted open-source curiosity into enterprise pipeline. She scaled a 30,000-member Discord, ran hackathons across seven cities, and pioneered a bottom-up adoption model that turned community contributors into internal Mistral champions, amassing 100,000+ social followers and becoming one of the most recognized voices in AI developer relations.

“As part of the jury, the nominations that stood out shared a common thread: leaders who are embracing the unprecedented nature of this current moment with creativity and conviction, but without compromising the fundamentals of revenue performance,” said Joe Abbott, GTM10 jury member and VP at Index Ventures.

The Shared GTM Challenges of 2025

Across all categories, this year’s nominees consistently tackled a shared set of challenges:

1. Doing more with less: Headcount frozen or cut, targets unchanged. Nominees had to find entirely new ways of operating rather than just working harder: AI tools, process redesign, ruthless prioritisation.

2. SLG → PLG or hybrid motion transitions: Inherited purely sales-led orgs and had to introduce a product-led layer from scratch, often as the first GTM or marketing hire. The hard part wasn't the strategy, it was earning internal credibility with product and sales to actually execute it.

3. Broken retention inherited on arrival: Nominees walked into "hands-off" customer cultures, poor ICP fit, or products sold to the wrong customer entirely. The challenge was diagnosing why before they could fix it.

4. AI disrupting their own playbook Traditional GTM motions were breaking down mid-execution: buyer behaviour shifting, outbound channels degrading, sales coaching needing a full rebuild. The challenge was staying relevant while rebuilding the plane in flight.

While Ziv Peled, Chief AI and Customer Officer at AppsFlyer shared; “AI is about to change how we do this work. The prep, the listening, the way we catch a problem while it is still small. But the teams that win will not be the ones with the best tools. They will be the ones who use AI to spend less time on the screen and more time with the customer.”

The Selection Process

Winners were chosen by a panel of world-class judges, including GTM veterans from Outreach, Zapier, Calendly, and Demandbase, alongside investors from Sequoia, a16z, Index Ventures, and Dawn Capital. Judges assessed candidates based on:

• Impact – tangible revenue growth or strategic outcomes
• Innovation – breakthroughs in motion, channel, or structure
• Visibility – community contribution and industry leadership

Recognition and What Comes Next

Winners received:

• Nasdaq Times Square recognition
• Featured profiles across industry media and GTM10.com
• Exclusive membership in the GTM10 Leaders Circle – A prestigious community of top go-to-market professional, including Invitations to regular invite-only events happening globally

About Cello

Cello is the all-in-one referral platform that helps SaaS companies launch user and partner referral programs with no-code simplicity. Trusted by category leaders like Miro, Typeform, and VEED, Cello is redefining how viral growth scales in SaaS.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm with $40B in AUM. It backs category-defining companies in enterprise, consumer, and fintech, such as Snap, Anthropic, and Rubrik.