Sift

Leading Partner Solutions & Success.

Sift is a leading provider of Digital Fraud Management solutions.  Understand your consumer behavior better through trillions of signals.  Make it easy for your good customers to purchase and pay - while frustrating fraudsters-  and watch your margins grow.

Accelerate your Growth with Trusted Customers that Convert.

Partnerships, Sales Engineering

Bolt

Bolt One Click Checkout offers the leading Shopper Experience from Account Creation to Order Payment.

We help merchants acquire new shoppers, retain existing shoppers, and grow revenue. Combine the industry’s easiest checkout, fraud detection that approves more good orders, and payment options for the way your shoppers want to pay.

Sales Engineering

Billtrust

Led Zero-to-One initiative and launched new product to market.
Founding PreSales, BDR, GTM, Post Sales PM, Education, Business Consultant for product line.

Billtrust is a leading provider of accounts receivable automation solutions. Digitize Your Processes to Realize Cash Faster. Make it easy for your customers to view and pay their invoices electronically, remove manual slowdowns and watch your cash flow accelerate.

Nasdaq: BTRS 2021.
Billtrust Acquired by EQT PE 2022.

Product Strategy, GTM

Led growth and expansion initiative accelerating shift from on-prem to cloud and managed services. 
Launched two new products based on the Eclipse Stardust BPM Engine (CARNOT and Infinity Process Platform).  

Created infrastructure sizing and commercial pricing models.  Developed outbound campaigns, messaging, blogs, and thought leadership webinars.

SunGard can assess and architect your future-state roadmap for highly available and connected infrastructure for the breadth of your application environment. We’ll develop a streamlined colocation and hybrid cloud strategy that embeds a high-performance network integration layer. We’ll ensure optimized application hosting, performance, cost, and scalability.

SunGard acquired by FIS 2015.

Product Management, Technical Consulting

SunGard - now part of FIS

Expanded remit with Product Management leadership.  Led adoption and migration plan for two acquisitions.  Launched program to accelerate new version adoption, driving down support cost and improving customer retention.  Led sales enablement programs including Total Cost of Ownership education series.

SunGard offers a leading liquidity and risk management solution for corporations, insurance companies and the public sector. The solution suite includes credit risk modeling, collections management, treasury risk analysis, cash management, and payments centralization and standardization.

PreSales and Product Management

Founding PreSales Player-Coach.  Launched first Solutions Consulting playbook and redefined buyer facing assets such as product demonstrations, presentations, RFI and RFP catalogue. Expanded sales engineering teams in USA, UK, France, and Benelux.

GETPAID is a fully integrated, web-based accounts receivable software solution that helps increase cash flow, mitigate risk and drive operational efficiencies.

The solution delivers full process automation, workflow and collaboration. Its machine learning capabilities and artificial intelligence (AI) engine creates a foundation for continuous improvement in working capital and cash flow. Choose from our flexible delivery options, including on-premises, SaaS and private cloud.

GETPAID acquired by SunGard 2005.

PreSales

🔴 You created a fast growth environment.  Early Stage, Growth, New Initiatives
🟡 You operate in FinTech driving Risk, Payments, Cash Flow, and Conversions
🟢 You need help right now turning curious buyers into raving fans
That’s where I come in. 👇

💸 Office of CFO, A/R, Order-to-Cash, Finance, Cash Flow
📈 Risk modeling and behavioral economics
🎛 Market Segmentation and GTM
🤝 Multicultural and International
🗣️ Public Speaking, Storytelling
🛠️ Mergers and Acquisitions
🧭 Deal Desk: CPQ, Billing
📢 B2B SaaS solutions
😍 Kindness is Key
🎉Let's GSD
🦻No egos

Posts are my point of view and may not represent anyone else's positions, strategies or opinions.

Arthur Hernandez

PreSales, Product Marketing, Analyst Relations, and Customer Experience executive with over 15 years of GTM experience in B2B SaaS, most recently as the Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia. 

I'm known for building fully remote teams of Good Natured Ass Kickers (GNAKs) who sit at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales - marrying customer-driven strategies with in-field execution. 

Professional accomplishments I’m especially proud of:

-	As a founding member of Medallia’s SE team, joining just after our Series B, I sold record-breaking deals to some of the world’s biggest brands, building the first RFP, demo, and POC processes along the way.

-	I led Medallia’s 100+ member Global Presales team through multiple strategic pivots, including verticalization, buyer specialization, investments in demo engineering functions and software, and numerous acquisitions. 

-	As a sales leader, I served as a cultural cofounder at Medallia, recruiting, training, retaining, and growing top talent (many of whom had never been sales engineers before joining our team). I attract gritty, get-it-done people, who value and care for their teammates.

-	I built a unique Sales-led Analyst Relations function for Medallia, earning Leader positions in five straight Forrester CFM waves (including a Sole Leader position in 2023), as well as the Gartner Magic Quadrant on Voice of Customer technologies in 2020 and 2021 (among many others).

-	I rebuilt and reshaped Medallia’s Product Marketing function to better align with key buyers, including helping to streamline the GTM process and working across product, sales, and marketing to influence integration, messaging, and pricing strategy for several strategic acquisitions.

-	I had the opportunity to represent Medallia on the balcony of the NYSE at our IPO in 2019, and the Forrester Business Value analysis I championed and executed was a critical part of our S-1. My Medallia experience also included Venture Capital (Sequoia) and Private Equity (Thoma Bravo) models.

-	Before joining Medallia, I spent 5 years as a Customer Success Manager at Confirmit where I earned a reputation as a go-to fixer, turning troubled accounts into happy and expanding reference customers.

Some personal roles that are near and dear to my heart:
-      Executive Sponsor to Medallia's Q-Field (LGBTQ+) ERG
-      Foster with Lu's Labs Rescue
-      Volunteer Chief Information Officer for the Del Ray Citizens Association
-      Mommy to a fabulous 6 year old

Elena Hutchison

Hey I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you're in a room where jokes are being made at women's expense, and you're not making your displeasure at those jokes known and clear to the people in that room... 

You are a part of the problem.

And just in case there's a voice objecting for you right now, saying "that would be rude" or "I don't have the power to stop that" or "that's disrespectful" or "I don't want to be that guy..."

See above.

The choice between going along to get along and doing the right thing is a binary one. You are either perpetuating this system or you're actively, uncomfortably, risking your power and place in it to tear it down.

Solves Gartner and Forrester Problems | Former Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia

I'll leave the security implications of McKinsey's AI "Lilli" getting hacked this week to people smarter than me on that topic.

I want to talk about Lillian Dombrowski, Lilli's namesake.

Lillian Dombrowski was the first professional woman McKinsey hired, in 1945. She spent 35 years there and helped build out entire practice areas. She earned her MBA while working at the firm. She designed profit-sharing and pension plans. She built the firm's archives from scratch.

And yet the only place Lillian Dombrowski exists on McKinsey's website is in the description of a chatbot built decades after her death. The one built to help consultants work faster. The one that quietly retrieves information, surfaces documents, and exists 24-7 without complaint behind the scenes, supporting the public facing client work.

What a metaphor. 

I don't think anyone is doing this on purpose. That might be the point.
Siri. Alexa. Cortana. Lilli. We keep reaching for women's names when we want something to feel helpful, available, infinite.  In this case we went so far as to call that an honor, as the platform is "as nimble, flexible, and thorough as she was."

Lillian Dombrowski was a trailblazer who earned a graduate degree and built institutional infrastructure at one of the most powerful firms in the world. McKinsey has nothing to tell us about her decades of experience there other than that she'd be honored to continue serving today in digital form. 24/7. without complaint. Nimble. Flexible. Thorough. 

We've gotta stop doing this.

On past International Women’s Days I’ve posted the expected post - but honestly I couldn’t stomach it this year. We’re plainly going backwards at this moment. 

Instead I spent yesterday building in community with Women Defining AI, Lovable, and She Builds. It was exactly the right way to mark the occasion. 

I saw women building tools to find summer camps. Tools for personalized journaling. Tools to meet goals and celebrate wins. Tools to spot and fix the still-biased language in job descriptions. Tools to decode emojis!

Fun projects. Whimsical projects. Practical projects. Projects designed from OUR perspective built by OUR hands. 

We know that female-founded startups don’t get funded at anywhere near the same rates without a male co-founder. 

Until now, that meant that female-focused products like these just wouldn’t exist. 

Now because of these new tools and the women embracing them - they can. And they will. 

That’s the International Women’s Day post that feels right in 2026.

This message is for Anthropic’s PMM team. Everyone else can keep scrolling. 

You guys must be working your butts off right now - but take it from me you’re absolutely killing it. 

By far the #1 question I’ve been seeing on LinkedIn over the past week and here’s the clear answer! https://lnkd.in/gRSmMk8q 

If anyone else is still reading this page ^^ gives a cut and paste migration prompt to use that is very similar to the one I’ve been recommending - although I lie and say it’s for another chat with the same LLM 😈

Hopefully rebranding Code and Cowork are next on the list so it’s clear what to use where so even more people can embrace. 

👏👏👏

Open article: Switch to Claude without starting over | Claude by claude.com

Switch to Claude without starting over | Claude

Don’t ask me what I’m building though. That’s what today is for 😂

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Industry analysts serve as pattern recognition engines. So can I.

I had three calls in one day this week with three completely different companies. Different industries, different sizes, different stages of analyst relations maturity.

Same story.

In every call, the AR team described Execs who view working with Gartner as somewhere between a necessary evil and an active source of resentment. One team told me their leadership "holds their nose" every time analyst work comes up. Another described eye rolls after every Gartner interaction, followed immediately by complaints about the bill. A third said their previous leadership's official position was basically: we don't want anything to do with them, but we don't have a choice.

These are serious B2B tech organizations with real market presence and smart people running them. These executives also evaluate vendors and negotiate contracts for a living. They know what a fair value exchange looks like. And when they look at what they're getting for six figures a year, they aren't seeing it. 

This leaves AR teams caught in the middle. Trying to convince their own leadership that the game still matters while privately agreeing that parts of it are broken.

To add a fourth data point, someone said to me yesterday, "I think Gartner's arrogance is a part of their brand, to be honest."

Here's my honest advice to AR teams: if your exec team sees this as a game, get them excited about winning it. That means clear KPIs that you can actually drive, and prep that helps them understand why we're engaging and exactly what we're trying to accomplish in the room. You're unlikely to change the anger, so reframe it and use it as fuel.

And my honest advice to Gartner: you don't want to run a business where your clients hate doing business with you. And it's not getting better. Executives are right to question what they're getting for six figures of spend when their main analysts won't talk to them six months out of the year, and take six weeks to schedule the rest of the time.

Side note: I reached out to the Gartner Ombudsman via email over a week ago about the questions I flagged regarding AI training safety for vendors. 

Still haven't heard back... 👀 

Just another data point in the pattern.

Has anyone else spent weeks preparing an analyst briefing and walked away wondering... did any of that actually matter?

I've been in enough of these conversations to notice a pattern. The AR team shows up with a polished deck, a tight narrative, a well-rehearsed demo. And the analyst is... fine. Engaged enough. Asks some questions. But nothing shifts.

Here's what I keep coming back to: most briefings are built to impress analysts. But the best ones? Those are built to be 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘭 to them.

There's a difference. 

Analysts aren't evaluating your story — they're building theirs. They're trying to explain to their clients (your potential buyers) how a category is evolving and which vendors are worth paying attention to. If you walk in with a feature rundown and a logo slide, you've given them nothing to work with.

So what actually helps them?

Tell them what you're seeing in the market. Share what your customers struggled with before they came to you, and what changed. Give them the language their clients are already using when they call you. Invite them to push back on your assumptions.

That last one is the hardest. We prep for objections like they're threats. But an analyst who challenges your thesis in the room is doing you a favor by telling you exactly what your buyers are going to say.

I've been thinking about this more in the context of what's happening to the analyst industry broadly right now. Buyers have new ways to de-risk purchases: shorter pilots, peer reviews, smaller contracts. The role analysts play is shifting. Which means the briefing has to shift too.

If your briefing is still a pitch, you're solving for the wrong problem.

How are you shifting your briefing strategy in this new world?

Are you the parent of an elementary schooler who could use some super educational and highly engaging screentime? Have I got the AI project for you...

You'll need: Claude Pro to get Claude Code (in terminal or the Claude desktop app...or apparently web now?!) and a way to publish a website (I use GitHub pages because it's free, easy, and Claude can do it directly).

Here's the prompt - which you'll enter into Claude Code: "I want to create a simple age-appropriate game for my <age> year old child to play on <device they have access to> via the browser. Combine <thing they are super interested in> with <thing you want them to learn>. Ask me any clarifying questions before we begin.

You may see something about a repository wherever you're working - that's the folder where this code claude writes will be saved. Channel your inner millennial (or Gen Xer) and remember when we used to save stuff to the computer - make this project (and all your Claude Code Projects) a folder to live in.

Answer any questions, allow whatever permissions Claude needs, and then let it cook. It should open a browser window at the end where you can play the output and make any refinements.

Once you like it, tell Claude to publish it to a github page - One you've connected the two, Claude can do this for you, and now it's on a website you can load from any device (including your child's).

Here's mine: Multiplication Tables x Geography (double whammy! 💪 ) for a 9 year old. Took me 20 minutes. She's obsessed.

Bookmark this now and you can build it while you cook dinner (seriously, you could).

Tell me what you're gonna build below! KPop Demon Hunters Vocabulary Lesson? Math game where the answer is always 6-7? Taylor Swift Themed Phonics practice  

The world is your oyster!

A quiz game for kids that seeks to educate about geography facts and multiplication tables at the same time. 

Lilli "gets you the answer so you can spend more time with your clients" while Thomas is "The Sales Person who never Sleeps." 

Yesterday I posted about McKinsey's chatbot named Lilli, and how we seem to reach for feminine names when we want to position AI as helpful, available, augmenting you. Basically doing the behind the scenes work that makes you shine.

Someone in the comments pointed out there are plenty of male-named bots too, and asked whether this distinction actually matters... 

So I wrote a little agent to pull me data on 80 more B2B bots, along with their original press releases + framing, and any backstory on where their names originated. 

Here's what I found:

When a bot gets a male name, it tends to be named after someone with established authority - a famous founder, a Nobel Prize winner, a fictional power broker. Harvey AI, legal tech, named for Harvey Specter from Suits. IBM's Watson named for a founder with a whole page on the website that has nothing to do with the bot.

When bots have female names, on the other hand, those stories tend to only exist or only be told in the context of the bot. Lilli, the first employee. Olivia, the founders wife. Izola (yes, that one), the CEO's grandmother.

And the PR framing follows the same dynamic you see in the first paragraph of this post. Of the female-named bots I looked at, 74% were described in passive terms - "always on," "saves time," "assists," "a shortcut to answers." Contrast that with 88% of the male named bots - they get active, agentic verbs like "drives rapid resolution," "the sales rep who never sleeps," "engineers solutions."

I don't think this is malice. I don't even think it's intentional or thoughtful. 

It's precisely because we're NOT thinking about it that this is happening. But if we don't start talking about it - we're gonna keep perpetuating it.

I'd love to see some female agents and their positioning in the comments. And if we can't find them... then I guess we've gotta build them. 💪

Ok I think we have all seen the McDonald's CEO trying to sell America on the Big Arch burger. 😬 

The tiny bite. The stilted delivery. Calling it "the product" instead of... "food" ?!

Here's the thought I can't get out of my head though: Someone was in the room when that was filmed. Maybe several someones. And not one of them successfully said, "Hey boss. I think we need to make some changes."

I get why this happens. When you're a senior leader, you have to be *extremely* intentional to get honest feedback instead of enthusiasm and nodding. The latter is more comfortable and easier for everyone involved. The default, if you will, unless someone pushes for better.

The stakes are high when you're cutting an ad for millions of people. And they are high when you're working through a major evaluation with the potential to move markets. 

For my AR and PMM friends - If you're aiming for Leader - who is in that room with the gravitas, and the political willingness, to call executives out when they haven't yet met that bar?

🙋‍♀️ (This has become a surprisingly big part of what I do)

I've lost count of how many AR professionals have told me some version of "I wish we had a seat at the strategy table." 

Elena Georgieva posted a version of me on this soapbox again yesterday! I'm on it so often because I hear it constantly. From practitioners at every level, at companies of every size. This wistful sense of: I could have helped with that strategic thing! ...If only only someone had asked me...

Here's the thing: If you want to be seen as strategic, you have to be visible doing strategic things! And a lot of AR teams, even really smart ones, are spending most of their time scheduling briefings, managing analyst calendars, and filling out RFIs. It's important work. But it's administrative work. And no one gives the admin team a seat at the strategy table.

So here are three things you can start doing today to inhabit the strategic role you were probably hired to play.

Go talk to sales. What do they need? What objections are coming up? Where are deals stalling? Which competitors keep showing up and why? Most AR teams I work with rarely have this conversation, and some actively resist it because they feel like it's not in their lane. As far as I'm concerned, this IS the lane. If you don't understand your company's sales motion, you cannot build an AR program that supports it, let alone prove that anything you did mattered. If someone from sales didn't call you for help with something in the past month...fix! (see what I did there AR folks? 😁 )

Don't have time? Cut back your analyst list. I regularly see teams with 20+ tier one analysts. That's not a tiering strategy, that's a mailing list. If you can't articulate why each tier one relationship exists in terms of a specific GTM motion, it's not tier one. Consolidating your list is a strategic choice that frees up time for the relationships that actually matter. And it signals to your leadership that you're thinking about ROI, not just of your time, but of THEIRS.

Finally, go build something with another department, then take it upstairs. The next time you get insight from an analyst that's relevant to product or competitive strategy, don't just forward it. Stay in the boat while the business acts on it - you need to anyway to close the loop with your analysts. Be the face of the business changes you are advocating for internally. Sure you might hear no. But a well-built case that gets turned down still puts you in a completely different category than the team that never asked. 

None of this requires a bigger budget. None of it requires permission. It requires a willingness to stop playing small and start acting like the strategic function you want to be.

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Arthur Hernandez

Elena Hutchison

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