Thought Leadership

Insights

Short-form perspectives on the GTM questions I'm most frequently asked about, written for revenue leaders thinking seriously about pipeline, operations, and the future of sales development.

AI & Sales Development

How AI Will Change SDR Leadership

"The coming transformation isn't AI replacing SDRs. That framing misses what's actually happening, and what leaders need to do now."

The question that's most frequently on my mind about AI in sales development is whether it will eliminate the SDR role. The framing is understandable but misses the more interesting and more urgent question: what does the SDR role become when AI absorbs the parts that don't require human judgment?

AI is currently absorbing frequently repeated work: initial prospect research, first-pass personalization at scale, scheduling coordination, intent signal surfacing, and lead scoring refinement. These tasks are time-consuming, repeatable, and don't require relationship intelligence.

What remains is genuinely human work: reading buying signals in live conversation, navigating organizational politics within a prospect account, building credible trust with skeptical buyers, and orchestrating multi-stakeholder consensus. These capabilities can be augmented by AI context, but they cannot be replaced by AI execution.

For leaders, the implication is directional: redesign roles around the work that remains. Organizations that make this transition deliberately will field reps who are faster, better-informed, and focused on the work that genuinely moves revenue.

Operations

Why Pipeline Inspection Matters More Than Pipeline Volume

There's a pervasive measurement problem in sales development: organizations are significantly better at generating pipeline than they are at understanding it. They can tell you how much pipeline exists. Most cannot tell you, with genuine confidence, what share of it will close, at what velocity, and where the highest conversion risk is concentrated.

Pipeline inspection is the practice of maintaining that understanding continuously, not as a forecasting exercise at quarter-end, but as a weekly operational discipline. Done well, it functions as an early warning system. When managers are genuinely close to their reps' pipelines, they surface coaching opportunities before deals slip, not after.

The ROI of inspection discipline is not primarily forecast accuracy, though that improves. It's the deals that don't slip because someone looked closely enough to intervene early. Implementing genuine inspection requires two things most organizations underinvest in: manager capability and data infrastructure that surfaces quality metrics, not just quantity.

GTM Strategy

Vendor vs. In-House Sales Organizations: A Framework

The question of whether to run an outsourced vendor GTM model or build in-house capability is one of the most consequential and most poorly framed decisions in sales organization design. It's typically presented as a binary choice. In practice, it's a spectrum.

Vendor models offer clear advantages in specific contexts: geographic expansion, early-stage market development where speed matters, and high-volume transactional segments. In-house models offer tighter culture alignment, deeper institutional knowledge, and stronger performance over multi-year horizons when built with sufficient management depth.

The failure mode I've observed most consistently is not choosing the wrong model. It's choosing either model and underfunding the governance required to make it work. My framework: before choosing a model, assess your willingness and capacity to actually govern it. The model you can operate with discipline will outperform the theoretically superior model you cannot.