The Barbell Strategy of Pipe Gen in 2025
The Signal
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Hey, y’all! 👋
I have a ~quick post for today. It's a fuzzy idea that's gradually become clearer over the past few weeks, shaped by several conversations I've had with founders/GTM leaders.
There is a “barbell strategy” emerging in the pipe gen playbook right now.
Here’s how I’m seeing it unfolding:
AI is incredibly powerful.
I agree that “AI is incredibly underhyped right now.” Automation works. And will continue to work if you’re being thoughtful and creative in the ways you’re deploying it (I’m still learning this in my consulting work; it’s hard, but magic when you figure out clever ways to leverage AI/automation).
Human-to-human relationships are incredibly powerful.
People want to buy from people. That has always been true, and is still true today. And, with the drastic increase in AI and automation (noise), human interactions become more valuable. I’m increasingly bullish on anything that AI can’t do.
Go-to-market teams are starting to do more things that sit on one side of the barbell, or the other. But, fewer things in the middle.
AI/automation examples:
AI workflows
AI agents
Automated workflows
Micro-campaigns
Account tiering
Scaled outreach to Tier 3 accounts / BTL prospects
Human-to-human examples:
Small events
Sending swag/office snacks
Dinners
Cold calling
Warm intros through your network
Podcasts
I love AI. I think it’s insanely helpful (I’m finding new use cases for it every day… with the majority of experiments failing ha).
I also love humans! :) And my belief/hope is that more AI/automation enables more human interactions. I truly believe this is possible — and even likely!
We’re living in a new world, where there is more nuance than ever before. Your go-to-market motion should match that nuance.
Simple example:
Exec/decision maker at a Tier 1 Account? Go with a manual, human-to-human play.
Individual contributor at a Tier 3 Account? Go with a fully automated, AI-enabled play.
I think AI will enable more automated workflows, which will enable humans to do the more… well, human work. The things that can’t be automated. The creative, thoughtful things. Building human-to-human relationships.
When building your go-to-market motion, you don’t have to choose between one or the other. In fact, most gtm teams should have both. The buyer journey is more nuanced than ever before, so a modern gtm playbook should evolve to match that nuance.
It feels trite to say, but the future is not about AI *or* human. But instead, AI *and* humans.
Teams leaning into this barbell strategy are having the most success generating pipeline in 2025.
Portals to other interesting corners of the internet I explored this week:
Last week, I did a guest post on Florin’s substack. And this week, he was on a podcast with the legend, Kyle Norton, discussing the rise of the 10X SDR. Highly recommend checking it out.
I recently had a call with Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot. Well, it wasn’t really Brian, it was his AI avatar. But… it was really valuable! (You can listen to it here). It’s a glimpse into the (wild) future.
OpenAI just released a 32-page masterclass on how to build AI agents.
One day, LLMs won’t require the user to choose a model — this will be abstracted away. You’ll just put in the task, and the LLM will be smart enough to select the best model for the job. But, until then, I wanted to give a shout-out to my go-to model these days: o3 on ChatGPT. It’s just so, so good. (This is me getting good karma points from the future AGI that runs the world)
Still not sick of talking about AI/agents? Check out this talk: How AI is Reinventing Software Business Models ft. Bret Taylor of Sierra. wE’rE sO eArLy.
I’ve been vibe coding lately. Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful: good tactical example of someone vibe coding, Replit’s (free) vibe coding course, and what tools to use (Lenny); tldr is below (I’ve found Lovable to be the best fit for me):
That’s it for today.
As always, thank you for your attention and trust.
See you next time,
Brendan 🫡
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