Holistic Go-To-Market & AI for B2B / 12 domains / €2M up to €1B+ / 14 int. known experts.

As a Chief Revenue Officer, I operated 25+ B2B AI, SaaS and traditional companies in more than 20 industries. I've felt firsthand how building modern, leading revenue systems became a very complex given. A bit like building a house. Everything became so complex. Every domain became a universe on its own, with all its subdomains and now even more so with AI and signal-based & asynchronous selling. 

You don't have everything in-house. You just do what you can with what you have. All while you're constantly trying to improve your go-to-market maturity in all these domains, relative to your current and next growth phase.Agencies and freelancers have a core offering and 101 side-offerings, which are average at best.Getting external help is also always very fragmented and very transactional in nature.

Everything is so solution-first, never that problem-first approach.Based on these experiences and findings, I created The GTM Syndicate. Where I developed my vision around holistic GTM and AI - and the 3 houses narrative. Then I brought together an international team of 20, best-in-class domain experts and their companies, across 21 domains of expertise. And created our complete mirroring offerings and holistic way of working, around GTM and AI.

Via our problem-first approach we’d love to see how we can help you as a long-term, anti-transactional, strategic knowledge and implementation partner. Whether that’s starting holistically, multi domain, or single domain - we can help you to build in-house.

2025 wasn’t an easy year. And I know I’m not the only one who felt that, based on the data and on the many conversations I’ve had with so many people.

For more than a decade, my work was about building, scaling, and advising companies. I knew how to create value. I knew how to execute. The past two years, however, were about learning. Deeply. Sometimes painfully, and often (really) expensively.

In 2024, I lost a year building ADCR Capital. An attempt to rethink capital through an operator-first lens. The idea was to combine hands-on execution, leveraged sweat equity, and a network of VCs and PEs. 

I learned an enormous amount about how capital really works and yes, I “burned a Ferrari” in the process. Expensive tuition, but real education.

In 2025, I went further. I started Journey, exploring buyer-led software across the full customer lifecycle. Strong conviction, real ambition but also the realization that timing, runway, and most of all having a seat at the table matter more than vision alone.

Out of that came The GTM Syndicate. What began as an experiment evolved into a collective of senior operators working hands-on with companies. Through a lot of experimentation, one thing became very clear. The future of GTM isn’t more tools, it’s orchestration & governance.

And that’s where another lesson landed. At this level, trust takes time. Real trust. The kind required for large organizations, meaningful budgets, and real change. 

It’s built slowly, through consistency, delivery, and shared context. Not through pitches or promises. That realization reshaped how I think about growth, partnerships, and patience.

Alongside this, I went deep into AI. Not as a spectator, but as a builder. I built and worked with long-context assistants, knowledge graphs, RAG systems, and real operational workflows.

That journey reshaped how I think about leverage, teams, and what “AI-native” really means.

One insight kept repeating itself: this only truly works at a certain level of complexity. Below €10–20M in revenue, teams can still brute-force progress. Above that, orchestration becomes the bottleneck.

So heading into 2026, I’m rebalancing.

I’ll continue building the GTM Syndicate, because the need is very real. At the same time, I’ll work hands-on with a small number of companies where I can genuinely make a difference - fewer things, more depth.

I’m also deeply grateful for the people I met along the way. The founders, operators, partners, and especially the members of the GTM Syndicate and this small LinkedIn circle we’ve built over time. The conversations, trust, and shared learning have meant more than you probably realize.

If you’re building something meaningful and want a sparring partner as a CRO, advisor, or operator, I’d love to talk.

And if 2025 was a hard year for you too, you’re not behind. You’re probably just in the middle of becoming something new.

Wishing you a strong, healthy, and grounded 2026.

Stephane

Stephane Maes 🪖

timisuite

salesgladiators

Talks about #saas, #sales, #revenue, #leadership, and #customersuccess

Realign your revenue system to 2026 with orchestrated domain & AI expertise / Fractional CRO & GTM Advisor / Founder @ The GTM Syndicate / Lovable TOP 1% lines of code (1,1 mio) & prompts (1,2k) generated

When I ran a full revenue system audit for a €30M manufacturing company, it was commissioned as a growth scan. It often is. 

It landed as a system and governance diagnosis. It always does.

We interviewed sales, partners, aftersales, finance, and leadership. The issue wasn’t disagreement. It was fragmentation.

There was no clear positioning. A serve-all mindset meant teams and partners didn’t know where the company could truly win and where it shouldn’t compete.

The dealer and service partner network had grown by inertia. No strategy. No segmentation. No expectations.

When we mapped it properly, four partner levels emerged. Only a small group could actually scale with the company.

The rest depended heavily on HQ, slowed response times, and consumed disproportionate internal capacity.

Aftersales was overloaded. Not just understaffed, but structurally compensating for production, quality, and partner gaps.

Key account managers and demo teams spent a large part of their time firefighting instead of selling.

Financial visibility was weak. There was no cost-of-sales view by country, channel, or motion. Margins were visible only after damage was done, not while decisions were made.

Data maturity was low. No shared data model. Tooling that couldn’t support the complexity of the business.

And then the audit crossed a line.

Through interviews and cross-checks, commercial irregularities surfaced. At that point, this stopped being about optimization.

It became about control, trust, and governance.

One sentence from the team captured it best: “It feels like a dragon without a head.”

People were working hard. Decisions were being made. Then overwritten. Ownership existed locally, but nowhere end to end.

That’s the real danger zone at this stage. Not collapse. But silent erosion, masked by effort and heroics.

Are your challenges still execution problems, or have they already become system and governance problems?

Stephane Maes

More and more teams are running with one third of the sales headcount. That's not only because AI suddenly enables humans to sell better. 

It's because they stopped hiring people whose job was to compensate for a lack of governance.

For years, sales capacity absorbed GTM failure. People rebuilt context that the system forgot.

They smoothed over inconsistency between reps, translated intent across handoffs and protected buyers from variance in answers, tone, and quality.

That wasn’t selling. That was humans acting as memory, glue, and quality control.

The real myth is that the problem was forgetting. It wasn’t. It was inconsistency.

Different reps meant different interpretations. Same buyer, different answers. Same account, different experience depending on who showed up and when.

That level of variance was tolerated when sellers guided the process. It isn’t tolerated when buyers self-educate, self-select, and disengage silently.

AI didn’t change this dynamic. It exposed it.

Without orchestration and governance, AI doesn’t create autonomy. It creates confident inconsistency at scale.

More output. Less trust.

The teams that shrank without layoffs didn’t just implement AI. They decided how their GTM system is allowed to behave.

One source of buyer context. Explicit decision rights. Designed service quality. Clear ownership of end-to-end behavior across the journey.

That’s governance. Not strategy decks. Not transformation theatre. Control.

The real question leaders should be asking isn’t how many sellers they need in an AI world.

Which roles in our GTM motions only exist because no one owns orchestration today? Who actually owns that decision in your company?

Perhaps the hottest topic of all in 2026, if you ask me: orchestration & governance.

Would love to talk to you about it. Curious how you're dealing with this and what challenges you're facing with actually getting there.

We don’t do deals. We build relationships. And in complex sales, that means time, patience, and a lot of asynchronous touch points.

Content, reputation and DMs. Conversations that go quiet and then restart months later. One of those conversations changed our entire direction.

A top CRO at a 100M+ company replied to an outbound message. We did discovery. At the time, I only had one thing to offer: a full revenue system audit. Really in the beginning of the GTM Syndicate and our first campaigns.

She gave me direct feedback. Clear. Sharp. Fair. And instead of defending the offer, we listened. That feedback became the reason I rebuilt everything.

We went from one monolithic audit to an overarching framework where companies can start with one domain, multiple domains, or the full system. Sales. Marketing. CS. RevOps. Partnerships. Subdomains when needed.

That was the real turning point.

Not a brainstorm. Not a roadmap session. One core ICP stakeholder taking the time to explain what would actually help.

Fast forward.

Nine months of iteration later. Continuous voice-of-customer loops. From rough outbound and MVP collateral to a fully orchestrated model with domain experts embedded where it matters.

Recently, their VP Sales left. She now needs to step and be the ad-interim solution herself and look for a permanent solution. 

Already overloaded (I l meanwhile learned how hard she works every day, to put that "overload" in full perspective). Already carrying the system. There only are so many hours a day.

She reached out again and asked a simple question: how would you help me turn Sales into a modern revenue system?

The answer wasn’t a deck.

We proposed:

1. First, a deep audit of the Sales domain

2. Then stepping in as ad interim VP Sales, part-time (every day half a day) up to 4/5th

3. A 6–12 month transformation where we build the system, build the team, then help hire and hand over to a long-term leader

That’s how I’ve always worked. Two companies at a time. Mornings and afternoons. Ownership, not advice.

I also told her, Sales of course never lives in isolation.

Marketing signal quality.
CS handoffs.
RevOps visibility.
Partnership motion.
ICP and ABM.
AI workflows for list building, intent, and account tracking.

When needed, Syndicate experts can plug in:

- Pricing and packaging that added 400M ARR across their 60 clients last year

- RevOps and HubSpot specialists mapping the full bowtie end to end

- Data and AI experts turning noise into usable signal

- Advanced, AI-driven Account-based Marketing

Nothing about this is transactional. It’s a relationship built over time, proven through iteration, and activated when things get real.

When your revenue system is under pressure, do you have partners who’ve already earned the right to step in and carry it with you?

We'd love to earn that right.

We don't do deals, we build relationships.

When was the last time you let someone look at your entire revenue engine?

Not a sales audit.
Not a marketing review.
Not a RevOps clean-up.

An outside-in look at how the whole thing actually behaves.

For most teams, the answer is never. Instead, help comes in fragments.

A sales expert looks at sales.
A marketing specialist fixes demand.
Ops cleans up tooling.
Everyone improves their part.

And still, the outcomes don’t change.

Because no one is looking at what those improvements do together.

2026 has started. And go to market has already changed so much in 2025.

Buyers changed how they buy. Signals moved. Cycles fragmented. AI amplified whatever was already broken or already strong.

In this environment, fragmented help isn’t just inefficient. It’s risky.

Local optimizations now create second-order problems faster than before. Progress in one domain quietly breaks flow somewhere else.

That’s why our starting point is always the same. We look at the system from the outside in. One domain, multiple domains, or the full revenue engine.

Depending on size, scale, and complexity, that ranges from:

1. Me screening the entire revenue system end-to-end

2. A small number of selected domain experts based on your specific challenges and me, screening your revenue system

3. For €50M+ companies, each domain being reviewed by its domain expert, coordinated as one system.

But this doesn’t stop at diagnosis. We’re not a strategy-only partner. And we’re not a collection of advisors handing over a deck.

Through the GTM Syndicate, we embed with your team.

We stay involved. We help you to decide what to implement and when. And we make sure it actually happens! That’s the difference.

Strategy.
Tactics.
Operations.
Execution sequencing.
All owned, not outsourced.

The output isn’t advice.

It’s a clear picture of how your revenue system behaves today. Plus a prioritized action plan based on impact, dependency, and risk.

From there, implementation finally makes sense. And it also sticks. Where you as an executive are the orchestrator. We just help you to make better music.

And for the right company, I’m not just helping with orchestrating from the outside. I’m still open to rolling up my sleeves. 

Being there every day or half a day. As your CRO inside the business. Or as a close advisor to you and your team, 2 to 4h a week. See myself adding a lot of value there in both scenarios.

Hit me up if any of this would seem interesting to you.

When was the last time?

I watched Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off last night. It hit harder than I expected. Not because of skateboarding.

He was world-class early. Lived for competition. Then, years later, got tired of the competition while still living for it.

- That moment when the money dried up.
- When everyone around him said grow up.
- When his wife’s environment questioned why he was still trying.
- When he adjusted his life downward just to keep going.
- Selling the house.
- Tearing down the ramp he made with his dad.

He uses one word that matters here: jaded.

When you make serious money early and it just keeps coming, you don’t learn durability. You learn velocity.

You don’t think long-term. You don’t secure. You assume the tap is permanent. Until it isn’t.

They then had to make choices and adapted their lifestyle, so they could keep on skating and building.

I had my GTM superstar phase early and it lasted for 11 straight years. 

Recognition. Velocity. Being ahead of the curve. Then, a decade later, realizing that winning inside the game was no longer the point.

Competition stops being fuel at some point. It starts being noise. Then he felt free and started to create again instead of being a robot, as he describes it.

He then later went back to competition, because he lives for it. But he had changed because of that journey.

What struck me most wasn’t his success. It was his refusal to quit when the external signals flipped.

No applause. No certainty. Just the thing itself.

Skate.
Build.
Figure it out.
Never stop skating.

That’s not ambition. That’s identity. 

This is the Personal Transformation framework. 

Not the polished before and after. But the quieter shift from proving yourself to staying true to the thing you’re built to do even when it stops making sense to others.

Birdhouse, his skateboard company, wasn’t built at the peak. It was built after the illusion broke.

Most people don’t fail because they’re not good enough. They stop because the environment no longer validates the path.

I'll never stop skating.

The hard question is simpler than we admit. Are you still doing the work because it matters to you or because it used to win you approval?

Most companies don’t have a Chief Revenue Officcer (CRO) problem. They have a control problem inside their revenue system. It rarely looks like failure.

Pipeline still comes in. Teams stay busy. Numbers are defensible. Bt confidence drops, decisions slow and outcomes become harder to predict month after month.

This often surfaces right after the new year, when teams start translating 2026 ambitions into operating reality. Even when strong heads of Sales, Marketing, CS, and RevOps are already in place.

AI didn’t create this. It amplified it.

- Local efficiency went up.
- System clarity went down.
- More gets built, automated, shipped.
- Less gets truly owned.

The risk isn’t AI itself. It’s building faster than the system can absorb. That’s usually the moment where advice stops helping.

Not because teams lack intelligence or effort. But because the system now needs daily ownership, judgment, and care while decisions are being made.

This is where an embedded model works.

- Half a day, every day.
- Inside the business.
- Inside the messy trade-offs.
- Building with the team, not around them.

Revenue systems don’t break on meeting days. They break in the in-between moments: handoffs, prioritisation, silent compromises, “we’ll fix this later”.

AI makes those moments more frequent, not less.

Being there daily changes the behaviour of the system itself.

Heads of function stop optimising in isolation. Trade-offs get made explicitly. Automation gets governed instead of layered. And the revenue engine is prepared for its next phase, not just its next quarter.

This only works under clear conditions.

It works when:

- Leadership wants ownership, not cover
- Mandate matches responsibility
- Execution matters more than storytelling

It doesn’t work when:

- The role is symbolic
- Alignment replaces decisions
- Authority stays fragmented

I’m opening space for one embedded engagement as teams reset direction toward 2026.

If your revenue engine isn’t failing loudly, but no longer feels fully under control as you build into an AI-accelerated future, you already know whether this applies.

Where in your GTM system did leverage increase faster than clarity?

Most companies don't have a CRO problem.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Sales has always understood this instinctively. Not as a warning. As a skill.

Sounding credible early matters. Explaining complex things simply matters. Reducing uncertainty in a room matters. That’s how deals move.

The problem started when those skills were mistaken for proof of system understanding. This went wrong long before AI.

People walked into companies, looked at one slice of GTM, named the obvious tensions, made confident recommendations, and moved on.

Nothing broke immediately. That’s why it passed. AI didn’t change the pattern. It compressed it.

The distance between knowing a little and presenting a full answer is now almost zero. Language fills the gaps. Structure hides the missing exposure.

What you get looks finished. What’s missing is weight. Because GTM systems don’t respond to explanations. They respond to time, pressure, and sequencing.

They only reveal themselves slowly. Through second-order effects. Through friction between teams that all think they’re doing the right thing. Through revenue decay no deck predicted.

That’s when articulation stops mattering.

This isn’t about human versus AI. 
Not senior versus junior.
Not even about fractional versus full-time.

It’s simply about how hard it actually is to see a revenue system clearly end-to-end.

If you’re unsure whether what you’re seeing is a local issue or a system one, that uncertainty is usually the signal.

Happy to have a look.

From a specific part to the full revenue system, together with the team of domain experts, in line with your current challenges & goals.

The year just started.
Everyone is back.
Plans are approved.
Numbers are aligned.
Leadership teams feel in sync again.

But what now? This is when things look most dependable. That’s the risk.

Something we keep noticing already, just 2 weeks in. More people are reaching out, both new and pipeline deals. 

Not in panic. Not because something blew up. Because pipeline conversations are getting reopened. Deals are being reshuffled. Forecasts are quietly being revisited.

When we ask what triggered it, the answer is simple.

“We can already feel this will get messy if we don’t look at it now.”

Teams are already falling back into old habits.

- Volume creeping back in.
- Fragmentation returning.
- Local optimisation over end-to-end flow.

1. January alignment is not proof of reliability

Nothing is under pressure yet.

No real trade-offs have been forced. No dependencies have been tested. No function has had to choose between local success and system health.

Everyone sounds aligned because nothing is pulling the system apart.

2. Most GTM systems don’t fail at rest

They fail under load.

When:

- Marketing hits volume targets Sales can’t absorb

- Sales pushes deals CS isn’t staffed for

- Product shifts who actually buys

- RevOps enforces consistency that slows execution

None of this shows up in kickoff decks. None of it appears in January forecasts.

3. The real risk is silent dependency

Every department can be doing the right thing. At the same time. And still create drag elsewhere.

That’s not a people problem. It’s a system problem. But it only becomes visible once speed increases and optionality disappears.

4. The early-year exec question

So the question in January isn’t whether people are aligned.

It’s: When pressure hits, do you already know which dependencies break first and who owns them?

If that answer isn’t clear yet, January is still early enough to look.

Something we noticed the first 2 weeks of 2025.

First or second working day of the year.

The inbox fills up again.
Meetings restart.
Targets get repeated.

And almost automatically, teams drift back to volume.

More outreach.
More calls.
More campaigns.
More motion.

This week I had a conversation with a 40M ARR company. 

Their challenge sounded familiar: “We want to run a more focused motion.
But we keep sliding back into volume.”

Not because they don’t believe in focus. But because once pressure returns, reflex takes over.

December was reflection. January is reflex.

Here’s where it quietly breaks.

- ICP exists on paper, but isn’t enforced in the system.
- ABM is the ambition, but not the default behavior.
- GTM engineering is discussed, but not wired into execution.

So when decisions get fuzzy, the system does what it knows best.
It scales activity.

Volume isn’t the problem. Volume becomes the problem when it replaces choices that were never locked in.

- Which accounts do we not go after?
- Which signals actually qualify intent?
- Which parts of the motion are allowed to scale, and which are not?

If ICP isn’t operational, ABM collapses into targeting theater. If ABM isn’t executable, GTM engineering becomes tooling without leverage. And when none of it is explicit, volume fills the gap.

What decisions will you finally make explicit before the system pulls you back to volume again?

While we get a taste of Napoleonic scenes and how Napoleon must have felt when he tried to conquer Russia during winter - you’re sitting behind the wheel of your revenue system.

It’s January. Snow on the road. Limited visibility. And yet most teams do the same thing every year.

- They keep driving the same way.
- Same structure.
- Same ownership gaps.
- Same handoffs.

Hoping the calendar flip will somehow improve traction. 

Surprise! It doesn’t. Revenue systems don’t change because intentions change. They change when structure changes.

- When ownership is clarified. 
- When dependencies are redesigned. 
- When you stop optimizing parts and start steering the whole.

Most GTM teams are not underperforming. They’re overconfident in a system they haven’t revisited in years. 

This carousel isn’t about motivation. It’s about control. Because when conditions get worse, speed without structure just increases risk.

If you’re honest with yourself are you actually steering your revenue system right now or just reacting inside it?

How much did your GTM System and all of its elements and parts, truly adapt to the 2025-2026 market dynamics and buyers and how people buy today? Which simply changed so much.

Not to mention how much each of these elements and parts of a modern revenue engine professionalized and became a universe on its own. Now even more so, with AI.

Your team could use some help.

We and I would love to help if you're a 10m up to 1b+ company.

You, sitting behind the wheel at your revenue system.

Me: How’s your revenue system going, two weeks into January?

Them: 👍🏼🤕👍🏼. Rambo-in-the-mud energy.

Everything’s fine. Except it often really isn’t.

That thumbs-up usually means:

- Nothing has broken yet.
- Targets still look reachable.
- Old habits still kind of work.

January has that effect.

People joke about reinventing the wheel every January. They’re not wrong.

But here’s the part that’s harder to admit... continuing as is isn’t sustainable either. And most teams already know that.

What I hear in conversations right now:

- Marketing, Sales, CS, RevOps fall back into familiar motions.
- Last year’s playbooks.
- Former ways of thinking.
- Former ways of selling.

While buyers changed.
Decision paths changed.
Revenue systems changed.

So the system looks fine on the surface. Thumbs up. No panic.

But underneath, many teams already feel how brittle their GTM actually is.

January hides that. Pressure reveals it.

So the real question isn’t whether your system looks fine today.

When your buyers don’t behave like they used to, does your GTM adapt… or pretend everything’s still okay?

Asking people how their revenue system is doing in 2026.

Opens LinkedIn after 10 days: 

- generic AI content
- recycled content
- content stolen from someone else
- the usual 
- *yawn*

Looks like we can do another 9 days.

What a bunch of shallow, superficial and egocentric bs.

Especially the “learnings”. It’s not about learning you anything. 

It’s about chasing a dopamine hit. They’re chasing the engagement dragon.

They have apps to track that. Some folks really live for it.

And somehow it makes everyone feel worse. Not better.

Ah, LinkedIn. Great place.

Seems like I cured myself with a long break.

Delighted to announce I’ll take another 10 days, at least.

Now back to business.

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