PLGTM

Creating the best event for GTM leaders & professionals at companies with a product-led motion. Learn more at PLGTM.com.

Co-founder PLGTM.com

Inflection.io

Co-founder & CMO

Co-founder & CEO

Adobe

I joined Adobe via the Marketo acquisition. I led a passionate team of marketers driving ABM for Marketo and Magento.

Director, Account-based Marketing

Marketo

I joined Marketo via the Bizible acquisition. I led a passionate team of marketers driving enterprise demand generation & ABM for Marketo.

Head of Enterprise Demand Generation & ABM

Bizible

I led an amazing marketing team in growing Bizible through revenue focused B2B marketing, which ultimately lead to a positive exit to Marketo. 

Some of awards we won as a team:
179th fastest growing company in the US in 2017 (Inc Magazine)
22nd best place to work in the US in 2018 (Glassdoor)
2018 Best places to work in the US (Inc)
2017 Best places to work in WA (PSBJ)
2016, 2017, 2018 Best places to work in WA (Seattle Business Magazine)
2017 Gartner "Cool Vendor" (Gartner)
2018 Top 100 Software Companies (G2Crowd)
2018 #8 fastest growing Saas startup (SaaS 1000)
2017, 2018 Category Leader in marketing attribution, account based reporting, and marketing analytics (G2Crowd)
2017 Best SaaS Product for Business Intelligence or Analytics (SaaS Awards)

Head/VP of Marketing

Microsoft

I was part of the team that launched the Bing Ads brand. I developed the first ever Bing Ads brand campaign, directly managed paid media, and launched the first influencer program. I learned I that I love B2B marketing.

Product Marketing Manager - Bing Ads

I joined the Bing marketing team right as Bing launched and held various growth-oriented roles. I learned my passion for growth.

Marketing Manager - Bing 

My intern project was to developed product marketing assets for a clever new program to drive search volume from workplaces. I learned my passion for working in tech.

Marketing Manager Intern

Quicken Loans

I drove organic search efforts for the nation's largest online mortgage lender were I increased organic search engine referrer traffic over 30% in less than 4 months. I learned that my passion for digital marketing can be a career.

Search Marketing Intern

Inflection.io - b2b marketing automation

Dave Rigotti (He/Him) is a CEO and marketing leader who has dedicated his career to furthering the B2B marketing industry and those who serve in it. Dave is the cofounder of Inflection.io, a modern B2B marketing automation startup.
 
He is a student, writer, and speaker about product-led growth, demand generation, marketing operations & technology, and account-based marketing. He’s presented at some of the industry's top conferences such as Adobe Summit, Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit, Demandbase's ABM Summit, PLGTM Summit, and many others.
 
Previously, Dave was a Director of Marketing at Adobe, responsible for account-based marketing in the Digital Experience division, supporting Marketo and Magento. Dave made his way to Adobe via two acquisitions. First, he was the VP of Marketing at Bizible where he helped grow revenue over 100x in 5 years. Bizible was acquired by Marketo, which was subsequently purchased by Adobe in 2018. Prior to Bizible, Dave spent nearly 5 years at Microsoft introducing Bing and Bing Ads to the world.
 
Dave is from Ohio and holds a degree in business (marketing and entrepreneurship) from the University of Toledo.

Dave Rigotti

5 years ago to the day I left a cushy marketing job at Adobe to start Inflection.io

We're in my favorite phase of marketing, which is the 1 - 10 journey.

We've done a lot in the last 5 years and I'm excited to see what we can accomplish in the next 5. 

I'm very appreciate of great customers and champions in folks like Jocelyn Brown M.H. Lines Adam Schoenfeld Adam New-Waterson Kristen Malkovich Katie Peters Paul Wilson 🤫 Andy Mowat Sangram Vajre Ronnie Duke Kris Rudeegraap Osman Sheikhnureldin and early supporters of our conference like 🔮 Sandy Mangat Tido Carriero Eric Keating Ramli John ⭐️ great partners like Mike Rizzo Lauren Aquilino 💕 Sydney Mulligan ☕️ Courtney McAra 🤠 and honestly hundreds more people.

Thanks to everyone who has been a supporter and cheering us on, it means a lot!

Largest B2B marketing conf in SF → DemandandExpand.com & co-founder at Inflection.io

Automatic "no hire" for me that surprisingly weeds out more than 1/2 of applications for my BDR role

1. No picture on LinkedIn profile

2. Emails littered with typos 

3. Fails to follow a simple instruction (please book time with me using this Calendly link)

4. They book time 2 weeks out

5. Won't turn on camera even after I ask them to do so 

Great way to weed out people honestly

On flip side, here are things I don't care about that a lot of other hiring managers do care about

1. Asking about salary on first call (totally fine)

2. Didn't graduate from college or maybe never went to college (totally fine)

JSESSIONID

li_at

We finally cracked outbound at scale for Inflection because of AI-based personalization

We're now booking more meetings per month WITHOUT BDRs than when we had 2 BDRs

Here's how we do it:

"Week in review" emails are a popular Inflection use case

Clay does a great job with theirs

Lots of other customers too

So we used AI to scan our prospects websites.

Download their logo, grab their brand colors, analyze their website for how someone might use their product

Then AI generates a sample "week in review" email for their company.

Account-based marketing at scale, finally

8 hours to setup the AI

1 hour to generates 1000s of account-specific "week in review" emails

Less than $10 in AI credits

Amazing

Inspired by Chili Piper's outreach which is the best outbound email outreach I ever received

I just spent $20K on swag b/c my CEO was using swag from our #1 competitor 

and so was a CSM and our Head of Success 🤦

Something like 7 years ago Marketo gave out REALLY nice backpacks

Our CEO and Head of Success were working at Marketo at the time, so got the backpack and the CSM was working in marketing operations and was a Marketo customer, so got one too.

It was so nice that they all hung on to it.

Even after we launched a Marketo competitor...

Even after we've moved companies from Marketo to Inflection...

They would even bring it to Inflection events 😢

Enough, I said! ha

We've finally bought some Inflection.io swag and I just had to get the nice backpack to finally replace the Marketo one

Starting your career in marketing operations is such a cheat code. Opens up so many paths...

Just at Inflection we’ve seen

MOPs → Product Sushrut S.
MOPs → Success Alicia Wilson 

I'm also trying to hire a BDR who is formerly MOPs

What is unique about marketing ops is you obsess over people, process, and have an efficiency improvement discipline across the entire marketing org. 

Plus, MOPs are some of the most "on it" people I've ever met.

Product @ Inflection.io | MOps | RevOps

Principal Solutions Architect @ Inflection.io | Marketing Platform for B2B & AI-native companies

Fight robots, fight!

I have a new hobby with my kids... combat robots! 

Specifically the 3lb weight class.

We are now competing at NHRL, a international level competition (last month had folks from 9 countries!), and it's been a blast. 

We're having fun together and learning a lot about engineering, design, continuous improvement improvement.

I have also been teaching them marketing. They helped pick the name, branding, a theme for us (we throw out candy to pump up the crowd to get a 'home field advantage') etc.

Thanks to everyone who came to our session at EvolveDigital + EvolveDrupal Summits in NY today!

I had a great time discussing and hypothesizing how AI is impacting marketing, the web, and customer experiences. 

I'm also grateful to my great panelists Catherine Spence and Charm W. who made it the session special, thankful to Kevin Shively from Pantheon for meting a great moderator, and appreciate the thoughtful questions from the audience. 

Here are some of the tools and resources mentioned in the talk

- Amplitude for AEO/GEO monitoring Carmen DeCouto
- Noble for getting placements in LLM citations Rahul Jain
- Inflection.io for marketing automation
- Docket Webless Worknet who is building web experiences for the feature (chat or voice based) Arjun Pillai Suyog Deshpande Ami Heitner
- Clay for their awesome billboards that have nothing to do with AI Bruno Estrella
- G2 as a site to care about for off-page AEO/GEO Sydney Sloan Palmer Houchins
- s/o to Sentry who added a toggle to turn off "marketing mode" on their site Rahul Chhabria

and +1 to Charm's great plug for Women in Revenue Shari Johnston

I can't wait to continue the conversation on many of these topics at Demand & Expand

EvolveDigital + EvolveDrupal Summits

Operating Exec | Investor | Enterprise AI | GTM Growth Partner

Strategic Marketing Leader | Expert in GTM Strategy, Brand Positioning, Global Campaign Execution, and Product Marketing

VP of Corporate Marketing @ Pantheon. Lets talk marketing, technology, and what makes the web work.

Pantheon

Amplitude

Growth | Product Marketing

Ensuring your company shows up on AI search | CEO & Cofounder at Noble

Docket

Webless

Worknet

Cofounder & CEO at Docket | fmr CDO at ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: ZI) | 2x Startup exits | Investor

Co-Founder CEO @ Webless | Generative Search & Content Discovery for B2B | Ex-Marketing Leader @ Samsara, Salesforce, Amplitude

We help users grow your business.

Clay

Head of Marketing @ Clay | ex-Webflow

Chief Marketing Officer | Board Member | Venture Advisor

VP, Marketing at G2

Sentry

VP of Marketing @ Sentry

Women in Revenue

COO | SaaS GTM Leader| Founder of WomeninRevenue.org | ABX Evangelist

Demand & Expand

Demand & Expand call for speakers is OPEN!

The audience quality is very high. Most conferences assume attendees are newer in career and push 101 content.

We want the opposite. We assume attendees are smart, experienced, and want content that is innovative and pushes people's boundaries.

We'll be closing it in a month.

This is your chance to speak at THE B2B marketing conference.

Apply today: https://lnkd.in/eRbGm3Vw

No alternative text description for this image

Congratulations Sushrut S. who demo'd our MCP server for Marketo at Mopsapalooza! Thanks for putting on a great event Audrey Harze ✨ and Mike Rizzo

CMO + MarTech Leader | Turning Strategy into Execution that Scales | Operational Intelligence™

When it comes to Community and Marketing Ops, I'm your huckleberry. Community-led founder and CEO of MarketingOps.com and MO Pros® -- where 20K+ Marketing Operations Professionals engage and learn weekly.

This is THE most impressive marketing automation demo I have ever seen

And really captures how Inflection is an AI-native marketing platform

In this demo, Aaron draws out a journey, uploads the photo to Inflection with a prompt, and Inflection builds out a draft

Kudos to Mustafa Khan, Bruno Estrella, Karishma Rajaratnam, Osman S., Tong-Tong Li and the Clay team on crossing $100M ARR!

It was an honor having the Clay team a sponsor of Demand & Expand this year.

Their booth was more of a lounge than booth and it was AWESOME. Mustafa and Tong-Tong Li inspired me make more formal changes to Demand & Expand sponsorships for 2026 to let sponsors bring their own personality to the event. Long live brand!

The Call for Speakers for Demand & Expand is now open! (The largest B2B marketing conf in SF). 

We have 4 tracks this year:

Demand - demand generation
Expand - customer marketing & expansion marketing
GTM Ops - marketing ops
PLGTM - product-led marketing

Talks featuring creative uses of AI are HIGHLY encouraged and GREATLY increase chances of being selected.

Demand & Expand is the largest B2B marketing conference in SF. It's happening in May and we hope to see you there!

You can submit you talk here: https://lnkd.in/eEUN3RET

or learn more about the selection process here: https://lnkd.in/eRbGm3Vw

past speakers include Katie Peters Bruno Estrella Kris Rudeegraap Vanessa Thompson Tanya Littlefield David Yockelson Dave Boyce Angela Winegar Kyle Poyar Marcel Santilli Ramli John ⭐️ Sonal Mane

docs.google.com

Demand & Expand 2026 Call for Session Speakers

Marketing Operations & Strategy Leader

Co-CEO of Sendoso

VP, Revenue & Growth Marketing

VP of Growth Marketing at Amplitude | Proven track record scaling teams and revenue at startups, scale-ups and growth stages | Growth | Product Marketing | Customer & Lifecycle | SaaS | PLG | AI

Distinguished VP Analyst and Gartner Fellow focused on Technology GTM (He/Him/His)

All-in on PLG and AI-assisted GTM.

SVP of Marketing @ Invisible | Angel Investor & early stage GTM Advisor | Ex-Bain, Carta, Investor

Founder & Creator | Growth Unhinged

CEO @ GrowthX.ai 🇺🇸 🇧🇷 // Ex- Deepgram, Scale AI, HashiCorp, ServiceTitan // CMO, Advisor, Investor

Building a community for product leaders (VP and Director-level). Founder @ Delight Path. 2x best-selling author. New book “Eureka” now available. Author of “Product-Led Onboarding” (+40K copies sold).

AI-First Product & Growth Executive | Chief Growth Officer | Scaling Partner Ecosystems & Product-Led Revenue Engines | $0–$500M+ Revenue Impact | Databricks | Former: Qualtrics, Microsoft

We're seeing fundamental shifts in martech user experience

From rule based workflows to agent-based chats

It used to require specialized teams of people with certifications to draft a campaign in marketing automation

Now anyone with a login can create a great first stab

Campaign ops teams are being upended from creators to reviewers

Also campaigns that used to take weeks of back and forth between many people is being compressed to just a few minutes of prompts now that the campaign owner can build a draft

Thanks everyone who came to our AI marketing event yesterday!

I was great hear the stories on how everyone is using AI for impactful marketing work.

Thanks Shari Johnston Aaron Bird for speaking and hope to see you all in May at the Demand & Expand confernece!

CEO @ Inflection.io & Demand and Expand - Marketing automation built for the modern data stack. Former SVP Product @ Marketo, Founder & CEO @ Bizible

I didn't make it to Mopsapalooza this year, but so amazing to see the Inflection.io brand organically show up throughout! Hope everyone had a good time!

See you at D&E in May!

https://lnkd.in/esp3ccfM

New! Inflection now has folders

Folders are near and dear to many marketing professionals and this was one of our most requested features.

Folders are not about categorizing emails or lists or journeys. It's about categorizing emails and lists and journeys. 

For example, you might have a Prospect folder with the marketing database list with the prospect template with all the prospect journeys like nurturing and separate folder for customer communications.

Much more to come here, but excited to see this one ship!

"Chat with your data" is a ubiquitous use case for MCP servers.

Reporting on a single campaigns isn't too hard, but:

Reporting on trends is much harder. eg how has webinar performance changed over time

or even harder...

analyze campaigns over time and developing recommendations on how to change performance

Someone could literally spend a week full time analyzing hundreds of campaigns and developing some improvement recommendations.

Inflection's new AI capabilities can do it in a matter of minutes.

What marketing events are you going to in 2026? Here are the ones on my radar! https://lnkd.in/eSXdchyA

Inflection is helping customers democratize marketing campaign creation 

Before Inflection, customers often have a campaign ops function that centralizes Marketo program creation

Unfortunately this leads to lots of back and forth between the campaign owner and the campaign creator with clarifying questions etc

Now with our new agentic capabilities, campaign owners (demand gen, field marketing, etc) can have campaigns drafted from Slack. 

They can then review the output and make changes themselves via prompts.

Once they feel good about a campaign, THEN it goes to campaign ops for review.

Way more efficient process.

Brendan Short

The Signal (.club)

• Separating the signal from the noise — a weekly newsletter on the future of GTM/tech (including AI, obvi)
• Subscribe now (it's free!): www.thesignal.club

Founder

Apollo.io

• I was booking ~1,800 meetings/quarter, fully automated (Apollo didn’t have SDRs)
• Read more here: https://www.apollo.io/magazine/how-apollo-tripled-meetings-booked-using-its-own-platform

Product-led sales ("AutoSDR")

Groundswell

• Here is what we learned building Groundswell for 2.5 years: https://www.thesignal.club/p/what-we-learned-building-groundswell
• Started off building in "product-led sales" and then expanded to, what I call, "signal-based selling" (using gen ai to find signals and generate next-best actions)
• Raised $1.6M from Village Global, GTMFund, Henry Schuck, Lars Nilsson, Shaan Puri, and other founders and executives from the world's leading PLG companies including Slack, DocuSign, Rippling, Snowflake, TripActions, Workato, and others
• Had the best co-founders I could ask for, Hari and Nick

GTMfund

• Limited Partner alongside great GTM leaders in the GTMFund

Limited Partner (LP)

Zoom Video Communications

• Consulted for Zoom starting in Dec 2019
• Joined full-time in 2020 as things got busy due to the pandemic (it was a wild time to be there)
• Led Operations and Enablement for the Global SDR Org (150-person team)

Operations & Enablement (Global SDR Team)

The Revenue Engine (Consultancy)

• While figuring out my next move, I took on some consulting and advising gigs to help B2B SaaS companies build scalable, predictable revenue engines
• I've been lucky to work with some incredible companies and people, including: TripActions, Zoom, Snapwire, WellHealth, LoanBase, Edvo, among others

Owner

OutboundWorks - ACQUIRED

• I joined OutboundWorks as VP Sales as part of their acquisition of my company, Hexa.ai
• We were building “Automated Sales Development”
• I led Sales Development, Sales, Marketing & Customer Success 
• The company was acquired in October 2019

VP Sales

Hexa (acquired by OutboundWorks)

• SaaS Product to help automate XDR work ("AI to replace SDRs" was a horrible tagline... but man, wish LLMs existed back in 2016 when we were working on this problem...)
• Acquired the technology of Brisk.io and merged it with Proleads.io
• Class 17 of The Alchemist Accelerator (6 month program; #1 Enterprise B2B Accelerator in the World)
• Raised $800k in funding
• Acquired for 7-figures in Feb 2018, by OutboundWorks (backed by True Ventures)

Wiser Solutions, Inc.

• 1st full-time employee (started as SDR then AE then Manager)
• Was there from ~$15k MRR to $10M ARR 
• Personally closed $1M+ in first full year selling - online retailers, brands & manufacturers (mid-market and enterprise)
• Built and managed the Sales Team (SDRs, AEs, Sales Engineering, and Sales Ops)
• Wiser was acquired for 8-figures in September 2016

Head Of Sales

Avista Solutions, Inc. - now part of D+H

• Cold-calling from a cubicle from 9-5
• Avista Solutions was acquired by D+H, for $40M (45 employees, in business for 4.5 years)
• I left after Avista was acquired by D+H (cubicle life wasn’t for me)

SDR (before the title existed)

Playing long-term games w/ long-term people ✨ Building Groundswell

Currently writing about the future of gtm/tech, at The Signal. Subscribe now (it’s free): www.TheSignal.club 

I’ve worked at a couple of startups ($0-$10M), a couple of big companies (Zoom Video, Apollo.io), and I’ve started a couple of venture-backed SaaS companies (Hexa.ai, Groundswell).

I’ve been an SDR, AE, Head of Sales, SDR/Ops Leader, and CEO. Jack of all trades, master of none, perhaps. 

I like learning and building. 🤘

Writer

• Separating the signal from the noise—a weekly newsletter on all things GTM tech

Brendan Short 🌊

Sumble is the most interesting GTM technology I’ve come across this year (no joke). Their bread and butter is providing the best tech stack data in the world (via job descriptions, which is clever). But they also can help GTM teams find “rich data” and signals that help present a *unique insight* which is how the best teams/reps in the world are breaking through the noise right now. Here’s what I find incredibly compelling about Sumble:

1/ Tech stack data

This is their sweet spot. If you’re looking to see what companies use Snowflake,  Rippling, whatever - they have it. They pull it from job descriptions. You can do creative things once you have this information (reliably). You can click in and see exactly where Sumble found {technology you care about}, and it’ll show you the actual job post/source.

2/ Identifying internal projects

They’re applying ML to their dataset to generate something they call “Projects.” Things like: Cloud Cost Optimization, Cloud/Data Infrastructure Migration, Design System Migration, Frontend Migration, GenAI, Microservices Migration, Security Infrastructure Modernization.

If you want to know which companies are currently working on one of these projects, it's a no-brainer.

3/ You’ll see the value in under 3 minutes

I’ve shown Sumble to dozens of people this year, and there’s always an aha moment very quickly (even non-technical folks get it immediately). It’s magical to see a product that is so powerful and simple.

It provides immediate context to the reps on who to contact and why.

4/ People data

Once you find a company that’s a fit (based off tech stack, project, or other firmographic data), you can drill into teams and people. Again, they’re a legit ML team (the founders previously sold their company to Google), so they’re doing a lot of technical work to pull this off.

5/ Signals

I’m a fan of signals. :) And they have signals that can notify reps (via CRM or Slack) based on their dataset. Things like: new tech mentioned in JDs, job changers, etc.

6/ Keyword search on JDs

You can search for keywords within job descriptions. So if you’re looking for “Sales Engagement Platform” or whatever, you can find it. The bottleneck is creativity, not technical.

7/ Examples of how I’ve used Sumble this year:

- Companies using Pytorch/Tensorflow w/ 1+ ML/AI Eng
- 5-25 data engineers actively hiring for data engineers + using Snowflake/Databricks/Redshift/BigQuery
- Companies actively hiring for specific titles based on *keyword* (not captured in other tools)
- B2C companies w/ 1+ {specific title} in the US hiring in the last 6 months
- People search for certain teams using SalesLoft/Gong/Outreach/Clay
+ I'll put a few more in the comments

PS: they just added an API!

I convinced Anthony and Abhishek to partner with me/The Signal, because I like the product so much. Thanks for trusting me to help spread the word!

Go try them for free and see the value for yourself → https://lnkd.in/gZBzxdu5

brendan short

Exploring the future GTM playbook → Writing The Signal | Playing long-term games with long-term people 🫡

Who are the best GTM x AI practitioners (with a focus on Pipe Gen)? 

No vendors please :) 

I want to talk with people who have deployed AI into production. Real use cases. Can be building their own tooling, or using third-party tools. 

Tag someone who has shipped something dope this year.

Doing a bit of research for a little event for The Signal... more on that soon (subscribe to get updated first: www.TheSignal.club)

Generic "signals" will become commoditized. "Niche/specific" signals will become the alpha and have staying power. These signals should indicate the right *timing* to reach out to a prospect. Here are 20 examples:

1. Warehouse robotics / 3PL automation
Signal: New fulfillment center announced (Workflow design phase → ideal timing for automation decisions)
Source: Press releases, careers page, job descriptions

2. API security
Signal: Public API docs show a major version bump (New surface area → expanding security debt immediately)
Source: API docs, GitHub commits

3. Sales compensation & planning
Signal: Job posts mention “new FY comp/territories” (Comp redesign underway → high organizational pain)
Source: Job descriptions

4. AI QA for contact centers
Signal: Support page adds phone or chat channel (Volume spike + multi-channel complexity → QA automation need)
Source: Support page crawl

5. Accessibility compliance
Signal: New accessibility footer appears, boilerplate content (Legal pressure surfaced → remediation required)
Source: Website footer change detection

6. Usage-based billing
Signal: Pricing page adds “usage-based pricing (beta)” or similar (Metering/billing complexity rising → need for usage infrastructure)
Source: Pricing page diff

7. Privacy / DSAR automation
Signal: Privacy policy page’s last updated date is within 30 days (New privacy workflow or regulatory pressure emerging)
Source: Website change detection

8. ESG / sustainability reporting
Signal: ESG/CSR report updated recently (Entering ongoing reporting cadence → tools needed to scale)
Source: Investor relations page

9. Expense management
Signal: Employee handbook updated with new stipends/budget sections (New spend categories → need for controls/visibility)
Source: Public handbook PDFs

10. Consent & preference centers
Signal: Email footer switches to “Manage Preferences” (Growing privacy + marketing pressure → need for consent management)
Source: Marketing email footers

11. CDP / data routing
Signal: Multiple new martech tags appear recently (Stack expanding → rising data identity and plumbing issues)
Source: BuiltWith, tag managers

12. AI enablement / sales enablement
Signal: Product changelog shows new AI Assistant/Copilot (Sales team needs updated messaging + enablement immediately)
Source: Product changelogs

13. FinOps / cloud cost optimization
Signal: Company adds 2nd region or cloud provider (Cost/governance complexity spikes → FinOps needed now)
Source: Engineering blog, technologies detected in job descriptions

14. Travel Company
Signal: HQ move or office relocation announced (Operational changes → need for new systems and workflows)
Source: LinkedIn posts, press releases

15. Incident management
Signal: Status page shows spike in incidents (Reliability regression → push for incident tooling)
Source: Status page logs

...I ran out of room. The last 5 are in the comments. 

PS: Much more on this topic coming to The Signal readers' inboxes soon 👀

Generic Signals are getting commoditized. Niche Signals are the new alpha. Here's what it means if you're building an AI-native GTM org today:

First, signal-based selling remains the most effective approach for GTM teams today. Much better than cold outbound (which doesn't work like it used to). 

Signal-based selling helps teams/reps find the prospects who are MOST LIKELY to take a sales meeting if you reach out this week.

Generic signals—like funding raised, hiring roles, etc.—are quickly becoming commoditized because everyone has access to the same data from the same providers. And prospects can smell the automation from a mile away.

(Operationalizing these signals is still hard to do, btw. So, I think there's at least another year for companies to use generic signals to get ahead of their competitors.)

But, just like back in 2016, it was novel to have Outreach or SalesLoft use “personalization tokens” in an email to inject {first_name}, {title}, {company}, or {industry}. Today, it’s obvious to a reader that a machine, not a human, wrote those.

The same thing will happen with generic signals. In 2026, I suspect that when a prospect sees a cold email that is based on {their new job}, {a website visit}, or {some other generic signal}, they’ll know that a machine (AI), not a human, found this signal and wrote this message.

But, not all signals are created equal.

Enter: "The great signal divide."

The next wave of alpha will be niche, specific signals that indicate the right timing to reach out have real staying power. And that’s exactly where the best tools are differentiating themselves (Sumble is one example).

→ Alpha
 
The alpha is in the creative, thoughtful experiments that only you can set up. And in choosing vendors who can surface signals that aren’t available everywhere else.

→ The more niche/specific, the better

I’ve noticed that the absolute best signals are ones so good that AI—or myself, as an external advisor/consultant—cannot come up with them. They have to come from within the company (almost always from either the founder directly or the top sales rep).

→ 1st party signals

It’s also worth noting that some of these signals will be 1st party data. These signals, by definition, cannot become commoditized because they are your own company’s IP.

→ AI / agentic workflows

Yes, many of these niche/specific signals require AI workflows or “agent runs” to identify at scale, autonomously. You should be asking what works manually, then scaling it with an automated or agentic workflow (or combination).

Conclusion

The signal-based selling market is splitting into two tiers: commodity signals that everyone has access to, and niche, timing-focused signals that create real competitive advantage.

Thoughtful, creative, taste-driven go-to-market is the future. Teams that proactively deliver real value to their prospects.

Read more in my latest blog post on The Signal:

Open article: Generic Signals Are Getting Commoditized. Niche Signals Are the New Alpha. by thesignal.club

Generic Signals Are Getting Commoditized. Niche Signals Are the New Alpha.

Who is doing AI for outbound on $50K+ B2B SaaS products (Series C+ — eg: has the complexity of 20+ sellers)? 

^ That’s the real turing test of if AI outbound works
(not selling event tickets—no offense to jason/saastr)

SaaStr AI London is Dec 1-2!! See You There!!

AI Agents work in GTM today.  We've got 6+ in production now.  They work for sales, they work for outbound, they work for marketing.  But ... 

They don't work well without a lot of training.  That means they don't really work well as self-serve products and at low price points.  For now at least.

Most of the vendors taking off have effective ACVs of $50k-$100k+.  That lets them use FDEs and other resources to help train the AI agents for the customers, often over an extended period.

And that works well -- today.  If you train the AI agents well.

What's next?

Doing this >well< for small customers and self-serve.  It's a real challenge.  But it's one we're excited to see play out.

In my 13 years in B2B SaaS GTM, I’ve never seen a technology adopted as fast as AI (or as impactful). But, there’s a lot of vaporware. Rox is one of the most impressive teams I’ve seen building in the GTM tech space—here’s why:

1/ The team is cracked

Everything is downstream of that talent (and drive). Ishan, the CEO/Co-founder, previously sold his startup to New Relic for 8-figures and led Growth there for 3 years. He has deep domain expertise.

They’ve built one of the strongest AI eng teams in Silicon Valley. And now they’re assembling a top-tier enterprise GTM team.

2/ Wave # 2 of AI adoption: GTM

Coding and CS drove AI adoption wave # 1. We’re in wave # 2, and GTM is part of this second wave. Every executive feels the pressure to transform with AI, and boards want to see ROI fast. Rox supercharges reps with deeper account context than was ever possible pre-AI.

3/ CRM → data warehouse

Enterprise GTM data is moving from Salesforce to data warehouses. I saw this firsthand, building Groundswell (product usage data lives in the DW, not the CRM). This shift is accelerating. The GTM stack is being rebuilt around the DW, and Rox is building warehouse-native for this new reality.

4/ Targeting the Global 2,000

This is different from every other company in the space. As a result, they can go to a CIO with a clear message of deploying “pre-built agents with enterprise security.” It’s a bold bet that will pay off big if they can crack that market.

5/ Real adoption of Revenue Agents

MIT’s study showed 95% of AI experiments have failed. AI is hard to deploy today. This is why Rox has built an in-house team of Palantir-style FDEs plus McKinsey-style growth strategists to implement Rox deeply into the workflows of teams they work with (usage is real with 400B+ tokens per month). Lemkin has talked about this extensively—the best agents need to be deployed for you, by the customer.

6/ The UI paradigm shift

Anyone who works out of Salesforce knows the pain of the UI. The future is agentic. And that means an entirely different UI/UX for reps to work out of (again, built on the warehouse, not just the crm). Rox makes legacy SaaS systems effectively invisible in the agent era. Less clicking, more selling.

7/  The intelligence layer

I describe the Revenue ‘brain’ as a place that can figure out which companies/people to reach out to, and how. The only way you can do this is if you have access to *all* of the data:

- unstructured data (emails, transcripts, etc.)
- structured data (salesforce, contacts, opportunities)
- private warehouse data (product usage data, time series data, etc) 
- public data (like signals)

This is a very technically difficult product to architect, while also integrating agents into the workflow.

I’m a fan of the team at Rox, and bullish on where they’re going.

They have a free product, so you can sign up (especially if you're in the Global 2,000) and see for yourself what all the hype is about :) rox.com/signup

I asked my intern (Claude) to analyze my LinkedIn connections. 

Here's what they just sent me:

Fun to clearly see the data behind a network.

It's unrealistic to "give an old school team new school systems." These tech stack infographics are misleading. 

This tech stack is for high-volume, fully automated outbound. This is the stack a centralized team/member (eg: RevOps, Growth, or a GTM Engineer) would run *on behalf of* reps. 

Enterprise companies are not downgrading from Salesforce to HubSpot (or Attio, etc.). They're not swapping Outreach/SalesLoft for Instantly/Smartlead (there's literally not a UI/way to multi-thread in them). They're not plugging in HeyReach and automating a ton of actions (at the risk of getting their LinkedIn accounts shut down). Replacing ZoomInfo for Ocean? These are completely apples and oranges.  

Just because new tools are available does not mean you should buy all of them. 

It's much more nuanced than that. 

Some of these new tools are REALLY valuable, but only in the right context. Think about using them for a new/different motion (not replacing your existing motion with them, in most cases). 

PS - I'm slowly distilling my (agnostic) opinions about the evolving stack on a new website — check it out at ProspectingStack.com.

Co-Founder @ Workflows.io | Growth playbooks using AI

Sales team setups 2020 vs 2025

The truth is that the job of BDRs & AEs never changed.

Their objective is still the same.

But tech changed one thing:

→ Volume 

An old school BDR could do:

• 50 dials/day manually researched
• 10 personalized emails/day
• 2-3 demos booked/week

A new school BDR in 2025:
• 200 calls/day
• 50 hyper-personalized emails
• 7-8 demos booked/week

And this was made possible ONLY with proper GTM engineering.


Here's the tech stack changes I'm seeing:

CRM: Salesforce → HubSpot
(no need for a CRM admin to make changes)

TAM Sourcing: ZoomInfo → Ocean.io
(find any company on the web)

Data Handling: Excel → Clay
(AI spreadsheet with APIs)

Global Email Coverage: Apollo → Findymail
(better coverage & validation & price)

Global Phone Coverage: Cognism → BetterContact
(best-in-class waterfall enrichment provider)

Email Campaigns: Mail Merge → Instantly.ai
(no comments here)

DM Campaigns: Sales Nav → HeyReach.io
(automating signal-based plays)

Call Recording: Manual Notes → Sybill
(AI notetakers are a must-have in 2025)

Give an old school team new school systems.

That's where magic happens.

I’ve been playing around with Gemini 3 and it’s insane. 

Would be ironic if OpenAI become the Yahoo of AI era, crushed by Google — again.

Google just woke up.

And OpenAI is feeling the heat.

A leaked internal memo from Sam Altman just surfaced.

The OpenAI CEO admits Google's AI progress could "create some temporary economic headwinds."

Here's what's happening:

→ OpenAI's revenue growth could slow to single digits by 2026
→ They're projecting a $74 billion operating loss by 2028
→ Gemini 3 Pro now leads GPT-5.1 in reasoning and coding tasks

Altman's own words: "Google has been doing excellent work recently in every aspect."

This is a massive shift.

For 3 years, OpenAI had peacetime dominance.

Now it’s a wartime scenario.

OpenAI is scrambling with social-infused features like Sora 2 App and group chats in ChatGPT in an effort to push top-line revenue and seek virality.

Meanwhile, Google's been quietly building:

→ Gemini 3 for reasoning
→ Nano Banana Pro for images
→ Veo 3.1 for video
→ TPUs powering everything

The real insight here:

• Google wasn't the first search engine
• Many came and went before it
• What matters is being the last mover

Owning the "stack" from chip to chatbot creates the only real enduring moat.

My takeaway:

Frontier LLMs are rapidly commoditising.

OpenAI pioneered the technology, but it can't defend margins when competitors match its capability.

I recently switched my new default model from GPT-5.1 to Gemini 3 “Fast” mode for general Q&A tasks because of its speed.

The sleeping giant has woken up.

And the AI race just got a whole lot more interesting.

Follow me Alex Banks for daily AI highlights and insights.

I cover the most important AI developments each week in my newsletter.

Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/ePSZP6KF

The Narrative Company | Executive Narrative & Influence Strategy

Something big is shifting on X. And almost nobody is talking about it.

Companies aren’t just hiring engineers or PMs anymore.

They’re hiring distribution power.

X brought in Nikita Bier
Cursor brought in Ben Lang
Google brought in Logan Kilpatrick
Cognition brought in swyx ​
Coinbase brought in Alex A.
Anthropic offered $250k+ for this exact skill set

And look at Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. The precision of their posts tells you someone deeply understands this platform.

Understanding the X algorithm is becoming a real skill. And companies know it.

Why are companies doing this?

Because distribution on X now determines:

• narrative
• talent flow
• demand
• investor attention
• product adoption
• cultural relevance

It’s happening on LinkedIn too, but X is still the center of gravity for AI.

The companies that win distribution don’t just grow faster.
They shape the whole conversation.

If you understand X, you understand leverage.

the cold email king saying ai should write cold emails is a turning point 👀

Struggling to book meetings? Getting ghosted? Want to sell without pushing, convincing, or begging? Read this profile.

Salespeople shouldn’t write cold emails.

AI should.

Salespeople should make cold calls.

Why?

Cold email isn’t a human sport anymore.
It’s a computational one.

AI can write faster.
Test faster.
Personalize deeper.
Analyze patterns instantly.
Send at scale without losing tone.

And unlike humans, it never gets tired, emotional, insecure, or trapped in the “should I say this or that?” spiral.

Cold calling, though, that’s human territory.
Tone.
Timing.
Curiosity.
Detachment.
Listening.
All the subtle signals machines can’t feel.

So let AI own cold email.
It’s simply better at it.
And let SDRs do what humans do best:
Talk.
Read emotion.
Navigate uncertainty.
Turn strangers into conversations.

AI for cold emails.
SDRs for cold calls.

What do you think?

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