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Happy Friday Saturday!
Wild times continue. This week, an employee bugged OpenAI’s office. And Elon finally demo’d a flying car.
Today, we’re back with another edition of the GTM Weekly Round-up. But first, I wanted to share my top takeaways from interviewing 20 GTM operators in San Francisco last week, at Clay’s conference, Sculpt.
Let’s get into it.
Lessons from interviewing 20 GTM operators at Clay’s conference
Last week, 2,000+ people gathered at Pier 48 in San Francisco to talk about modern go-to-market. I showed up with a camera man and a mic, and asked 20 GTM operators a bunch of questions. Things like: “What’s something you’ve built with AI recently?” “How are you currently thinking about ‘build vs. buy’?” “What’s your AI hot take?” “What hasn’t changed in the AI-era?” Etc.
Here are a few themes that most people I interviewed agreed on:
Data hygiene still decides everything. AI just makes bad data fail faster. I liked how succinctly Bruno (who leads marketing at Clay) put it to me: “AI activation without an infrastructure layer is useless.”
GTM engineering is still mostly stuck in outbound. Adam Schoenfeld, Crissy Saunders (CS2), and several others said the role has to reach into marketing, events, CS, and more.
You should buy the foundation and build on top of it. Most people I spoke with are building at the cutting edge of AI and GTM. To these type of people, it’s no longer about build versus buy. It’s build and buy. The question now is: when do you do which one?
Context is the next layer. Five different people named some version of a context layer, context engine, or semantic layer as the thing they’re building right now.
Human interaction becomes more valuable in the AI-era. Whether its conferences, prospect dinners, calls instead of automated emails, or getting on the plane to meet with a customer. Everyone agrees this is going to become more important, not less.
But, of course, not everyone agreed on everything. Here were some of the topics where there was not consensus:
Do people still buy from people? Most said yes, and someone told me that agents selling to agents is “total B.S.” But, one Director of GTM Engineering told me buyers already trust agents to make purchases for them. And Varun, one of Clay’s co-founders, told me they saw something interesting in early testing of their inbound SDR agent: prospects told the agent more than they tell human reps.
Building in-house is overrated. Almost every build vs. buy answer ended up talking about the sneaky cost of maintenance.
AI is the worst tool for outbound. Spicy. Jorge (Founder of The GTM Engineering Company) thinks buyers will learn to spot AI personalization the same way they learned to spot merge tags.
You should use AI less for things you’re less certain about. My friend, and former colleague, Andreas (Snowball Consult), told me that when he’s doing work for the first time, he does it by hand on purpose so it doesn’t run away from him. Charlie (of CS2) made a great case for a lot of workflows to stay deterministic, because adding an LLM makes them more expensive and less accurate.
“AI” does not just equal “LLMs.” Nate (founder of Fluint) says teams ignoring classical ML are leaving a lot on the table.
I’m going to publish a couple videos of these interviews over the next two weeks. But for today, here are the spiciest takes from last week:
Press play 👆 to watch on YouTube (or watch it on X here).
Weekly GTM Round-up:
Join us on Tuesday at 9am PST for The Signal’s Live Show.
Guests include Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged) and Maja Voje (GTM Strategist), who just published The 2026 State of B2B GTM.
They’ll share the highlights from the report, what was surprising, the hottest GTM tools right now, and more. Their survey showed the #1 GTM channel is warm intros/referrals. So I’m also bringing my friend Richard Purcell on to demo how he runs this motion successfully.
It’ll be a fun one → Register here.
X went crazy over this 20VC episode with the SVP of Sales at Ramp (who announced a raise at $60B valuation this week. And announced Glass, a new AI workspace. they’re cooking). Anyway, this convo was great. Here were Harry’s takeaways. And here’s why you should listen to Max:
Oldie, but goodie - about sales (h/t to Alex for resurfacing it this week):
Travis Henry is maybe the best RevOps operator I personally know (he doesn’t post much online… I need to convince him to). Anyway, he recently moved from Snowflake to Temporal, as VP of RevOps. And he’s hiring a bunch of critical/early GTM ops roles. You should work with him if you can.
Don’t @ me, marketers…
Very true for most sellers in today’s market (I do not envy product marketers right now):
Todd bringing the heat:
Exa passed $100M in ARR this month. Crazy chart below. From Will’s post (CEO of Exa) this week: “We predict agents will search 1000x more than humans by 2030. Agents don’t search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world’s data, not just the web. We’ve spent 5 years building a search engine designed for them.”
Nooks is hosting a livestream next week, with Ghazi Masood (CRO, Replit) and Hannah Willson (CRO, Nooks) to dig into what changes for AEs when agents join the sales team (what agents can take on, where human judgment and relationships matter most, and how leaders can put this into practice to keep deals moving and drive performance). Register here: “The GTM Frontier: Building the AE Team for the Revenue Agent Era with the CRO.”
Not wrong…
Champion raised another $5 million to “put human relationships at the center of go-to-market,” bringing their total raised to date over $10M
Mark with a pithy banger:
Gartner dropped their magic quadrant this week for the Revenue Action Orchestration category (that’s a mouthful). Fun to see some new (AI-native) logos on it this year!
Alright, that’s it for today.
As always, thank you for your attention and trust. I do not take it for granted.
See you next week,
Brendan 🫡
PS: If you liked today’s post, send it to one person who would enjoy it.