Customer empathy is sometimes treated as a soft skill: useful in a discovery call, but separate from the serious work of building a go-to-market system. Liz Christo's career suggests the opposite. Empathy becomes operational when it helps a team understand where revenue comes from, choose the right customer, and build a commercial motion that can scale without losing the reason buyers cared in the first place.
Her perspective spans hospitality, support, sales leadership, the scale-up years at NetSuite, and venture investing at Stage 2 Capital. Across those roles, the same lesson keeps resurfacing: strong GTM judgment begins with a close understanding of the customer and becomes valuable when it shapes decisions.
Hospitality teaches attention before it teaches service
Hospitality gave Liz an early education in reading a situation from another person's point of view. Good service is not merely friendliness. It requires noticing what someone needs, understanding the context around the request, and responding in a way that makes the experience easier.
That habit transfers directly into go-to-market work. A sales team can follow a process perfectly and still miss the customer if it listens only for qualification criteria. Empathy improves the quality of the information entering the system because it helps sellers distinguish between a stated request and the underlying problem.
For operators, this means customer understanding should not live only in call recordings or persona documents. It should influence segmentation, messaging, enablement, product feedback, and the way the company defines a good-fit opportunity.
Learn where the money comes from
One lesson from Liz's time at NetSuite stayed with her: learn where the money comes from.
The advice sounds obvious, but growth can obscure it. Teams become busy with activity metrics, tools, hiring plans, and internal reporting while losing sight of the specific customer problems that create revenue. Commercial fluency means understanding who pays, why they pay, how the company delivers value, and what must remain true for the relationship to expand.
That knowledge changes how a GTM leader prioritizes. It becomes easier to separate an attractive activity from a meaningful one, recognize when a segment is consuming more than it returns, and explain why one investment deserves resources before another.
Great sales teams match problems to solutions
Liz's view of selling is not simply about closing. Strong teams understand the customer, understand the product, and can tell when the match is real.
That last part matters. A team that treats every account as equally winnable creates noise throughout the revenue system. Forecasts become less reliable, product expectations drift, and customer success inherits deals that were never well aligned.
Empathy does not mean agreeing with every prospect or forcing a fit. It means understanding the buyer well enough to make a responsible judgment. Sometimes the most commercially mature answer is that the product is not right for the problem.
Scale turns individual judgment into a system
As teams grow, leaders cannot participate directly in every customer conversation. The work shifts from personal execution to systems, priorities, hiring, and talent development.
The challenge is preserving judgment while adding structure. A process should make good decisions more repeatable, not replace thinking with fields and stages. Leaders need to identify which customer signals matter, how those signals travel between teams, and where people still need room to use context.
This is why early operating experience matters. Leaders who have worked close to customers are better positioned to recognize when a process supports the field and when it merely makes the dashboard look orderly.
Investors see the cost of missing operating context
Moving into venture gave Liz a wider view of the problems founders encounter. Many decisions appear straightforward from the outside but look different after someone has lived through hiring, scaling, customer pressure, and changing market conditions.
Founders benefit from advice that connects strategy to the operating consequences. A recommendation to pursue a segment, add a role, or change a motion affects real workflows and real people. The best guidance combines pattern recognition with curiosity about what is distinctive in the business.
The practical lesson for GTM leaders
Customer empathy becomes an operating skill when it changes what the company does:
- Use customer understanding to improve segmentation and qualification.
- Teach teams how the business makes money, not only how the process works.
- Reward good-fit judgment alongside closing performance.
- Build systems that carry customer context across functions.
- Keep leaders close enough to the work to recognize when the model has drifted.
Empathy is not a substitute for commercial discipline. It is one of the inputs that makes commercial discipline possible.
About the guest
Liz Christo is a Partner at Stage 2 Capital. Her career spans hospitality, customer support, sales leadership, high-growth software operations, and venture investing. She works with founders on the practical go-to-market decisions required to build and scale durable companies.
