Andrew Gilbert

Bigger vendor isn’t always better for Sales Teams. 📉 The Highspot + Seismic merger is official. While the headlines talk about "Market Leadership," many sales leaders are asking a different question: "How long will it take for my support ticket to get answered during this multi-year integration?" "Where is my roadmap feature that was promised?" History shows that massive tech mergers often lead to: ❌ Slower innovation cycles. ❌ Integration headaches for the customer. ❌ A "feature bloat" that makes simple tasks complex. AND esepcially in 2026, sales teams can't afford that slow response and ambiguity affecting their core function ⇉ revenue generation. In the sales enablement space, we are hitting an inflection point. The market is splitting into two: ↳ The Giants: Massive, end-to-end "Revenue Clouds" that are powerful but complex. ↳ The Specialized: Nimble, AI-native platforms like SalesTable AI that focus on simple and AI first; making your reps Ready to Sell on Day 1. Congrats to the teams at Highspot and Seismic, but for those of you looking for speed and agility in 2026... the game just changed and we are here to collaborate. Gerhard Gschwandtner - this is the exact topic we discussed during our interview :) Now, it's happening. https://lnkd.in/gtF3R-Zc #SalesTech #StartupLife #SalesReadiness #SalesEnablement #Consolidation #SalesTable

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Kyle James makes a great observation about how GTM teams are approaching platforms like Gainsight today. What looks like hesitation is often discipline. Teams are taking time to pressure test workflows, data, and ownership before committing to a platform. That behavior does not diminish the value of Gainsight. In many cases, it increases it. When teams arrive with clearer intent and operational readiness, adoption improves and outcomes compound faster. The signal here is not about building instead of buying. It is about earning the right to scale with the platform once the foundation is actually in place. https://lnkd.in/emF9ZvCQ

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📢 "I planned for $10M, but I'm actually at $5M... and I'm already $5M behind." That's the capacity-planning version of "our app is like Uber meets Netflix," but it's actually just Excel with a login screen. 🤣 👉 If this sentence just triggered your PTSD, you're not alone. That's what we have discussed with Lin Ling. A few takeaways from the conversation: Your beautiful capacity model dies immediately after: ❇️ Someone quits (there goes Q1) ❇️ A top performer gets PIP'd or finds another job (there goes Q2) ❇️ Finance freezes headcount because of no performance (there goes... everything) 🤔 The vicious cycle destroying revenue teams is like this: Sales misses number -> Finance cuts budget -> HR freezes hiring -> RevOps scrambles to reforecast or build a contingency plan -> Sales has even less capacity -> Repeat until insanity. CFO comes after your ... (you know what). The solution most companies miss: 1️⃣ Forward visibility. 2️⃣ Real-time attrition tracking/ hiring backlog/ backfill period. 3️⃣ Actual capacity (not theoretical) updated daily. 🎯 Stop treating capacity planning like an annual PowerPoint exercise. It's a living system that needs real-time data, not quarterly prayers. Time has changed, and there is no reason to stick to your old model. ‼️ Capacity planning shouldn't require a PhD in Excel and three Red Bulls a day to keep it alive. If your CFO needs four spreadsheets to understand your headcount math, you've already lost. This isn't good... ❓ Are the companies crushing their targets? They detect issues before they happen. They inspect their actual vs. planned capacity daily. They correct course before they're underwater. 😂 That's the difference between hitting plan and updating your LinkedIn status to #OpenToWork What's your real capacity gap right now? (The actual number, not the one in your board deck) #revops #capacityplanning #gtmai #moderngtm #startups

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In GTM, 2025 was the year of Clay. Clay helped revenue teams automate a large part of manual work: • data enrichment (accounts, contacts, signals) • basic personalization at scale • outbound workflows and sequencing It made automation practical and accessible. Less manual ops. Less spreadsheets. Less copy-paste. But automation is still not autonomy. As we move into 2026, the shift is becoming clear. We’re moving from the Clay era into the Claude (agentic) era. This is no longer about running predefined workflows. It’s about cloud-based autonomous AI agents that can: • own concrete problems end-to-end • compound context over time • coordinate sub-tasks • and improve execution without constant human input For GTM and revenue leaders, the role changes again. From choosing tools…to deciding what work should never be done by humans again — and what must stay human. Clay automated work. Claude pushes us toward delegating work. Question: what part of your GTM or revenue motion would you trust an autonomous AI agent with in 2026 — and where would you still keep a human in the loop.

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If there’s one insight from speaking to Revenue Leaders for the State of Outbound, the strategy in 2026 is about focusing on *low hanging accounts*. John Barrows said, "Where AI is creating the most complexity, risk, and false confidence today is in outbound. Too many teams are using AI to scale volume rather than relevance, accelerating the “better spam” problem. The result is more activity, more noise, and more damage to brand and deliverability without a meaningful lift in response rates or pipeline quality." The pattern is, leaders know they need to be more intentional about target accounts, better aligned across sales, marketing, and CS, and smarter about how signals actually get operationalized through tech… but making that happen is hard. They feel stuck between glorified contact databases, pricey ABM platforms (which are contrived imo), or AI outbound tools that automate to the point where you lose control. That’s why I was excited when my friend Rick Young — one of the strongest enterprise outbound leaders I’ve worked with — started building something to simplify the problem directly for the reps. ➡️ Prioritize low hanging accounts based on custom signals YOU create ➡️ Get notes on why the timing is right ➡️ Find your buying committee and pull contacts ➡️ Draft messaging per contact for you to approve and send We’ve been testing a pilot internally and running a small number of free pilots to help teams identify their lowest-hanging accounts. Curious how others are approaching this!

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how do you set pipeline targets across demand gen, abm, events, and sdr - without turning comp into a sourcing fight? a few years ago, i was on stage with Maria Velasquez and Daniel Bleichman. someone asked about attribution. i said attribution is a horseshit concept. (bless the cybermarketing community for letting you name things as they are.) i still think so. but we had the conversation internally for the first time, and it turned into a more useful question: how do you build a system that rewards influence, and keeps people accountable? there’s an old fable about a rooster convinced his crowing made the sun come up. that’s last-touch attribution. some pipeline really does walk in alone. a referral from the network. a cold email into an account that had never heard of you. an event lead from a different industry who somehow ends up converting. one channel did the job. fine. but most pipe isn’t built like that. you target a large account for a year. they get soaked: thought leadership, ads with the right message at the right time, webinars, sdrs building relationships across the buying group, social posts, peer conversations, brand memory, category education - all the things that are real, but most of them are annoying to measure. a year of weather. then one sunny day, someone fills out a demo form. or an sdr gets the reply. or an event meeting compresses a year of brand, sales, and marketing touches into: “yeah, let’s talk.” and suddenly one channel files for custody of the opportunity. most of the time, the channel isn’t creating the pipe from zero. it’s capturing the moment the account finally became ready. new exec. budget opened. vendor pain became impossible to ignore. internal project got priority. and yes, the last touch mattered. but pretending it acted alone is how you turn reporting into office politics. flip the model, and you just flip the thief. first touch? brand robs the sdr. last touch? sdr robs the brand. multi-touch? everyone gets 17%? pick your liar. the point isn’t that every opp needs every channel. the point is that you can’t tell what actually happened from the source field. (smaller companies - have it easier. fewer channels, barely any audience overlap, so source really does equal credit. but that’s the exception. i’m talking about the moment your channels start hitting the same accounts) a few years ago, i was arrogant enough to call attribution horseshit. but as our GTM team doubled, the problem flipped from philosophical to operational. so i’ll ask the smart people here: 1. how do you set comp, targets, and leadership accountability when everyone influences the same pipeline - but someone still needs to own every budget line? 2. if you move to one shared number, how do you prevent shared responsibility from becoming nobody’s responsibility? 3. if you don’t move to one shared number, how do you avoid smuggling the attribution horseshit back into the system?

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