This editorial appeared in the May 22nd, 2025, issue of the Topline newsletter.
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GTM is walking into a sticky AI trap. We're using revolutionary technology for evolutionary improvements — as if all we have is a faster calculator. But AI is that and much more. It's a portal into a new world where what was never possible is possible now.
Jordan Crawford drove this point home in last week's Q&A when he said GTM isn't giving enough thought to the things we couldn’t do before.
He's right!
GTM is a mess right now. 50% of private venture-backed SaaS companies missed their Q1 numbers, 78% of sales reps missed their targets, and GTM Efficiency keeps getting worse.
Looking ahead, one thing is certain — there will be exponentially more companies competing for attention and spend. If all we extract from AI is incremental improvements to existing processes, the flood of new competition will make every one of these metrics worse.
But that's not the only way to look at it. Yes, AI will increase competition, making distribution harder. But it will also unlock entirely new capabilities we've never had access to before.
Will they be powerful enough to matter? Let's explore some breakthrough capabilities that exist today but were impossible just two years ago — and see if they're the game-changers GTM desperately needs.
Getting a prospect's attention is brutally hard today. The average email reply rate is 2.9% (and that includes "not interested" responses). The average seller needs to make 800 cold calls to book just 2 meetings.
Most companies tried to solve this with volume. Blast more emails, make more calls. But volume kills personalization, which is why our inboxes are littered with tacky, bland messages that nobody responds to.
AI obliterates this trade-off.
Using MCP (Model Context Protocol), you can connect data sources and query them instantly. Sellers pull insights in seconds that used to take hours. Instead of the crap in our inboxes today, they can lead with specific observations about business challenges or recent developments that they didn’t have the time to access before.
Jordan's Housecall Pro example from last week showed this in action. But even if you don't have proprietary data, you can build a powerful insights engine using public information.
Here's how: Connect public earnings reports, Crunchbase data, LinkedIn insights, and VC research into one queryable database. A seller prospecting a SaaS company asks: "What hiring challenges is this company facing compared to their competition?" AI returns specific talking points about engineering bottlenecks and expansion plans.
This didn't exist a year ago.
When sellers have this intelligence, they become trusted advisors instead of product pushers. Scale this across your team, and those dismal response rates start climbing.
Better GTM performance starts with better coaching. Today, the average sales manager has 8-10 direct reports, attends 3X more meetings than in 2020, and 40% feel burned out daily. Instead of spending 25-30% of their time coaching, 73% of sales managers spend less than 5% developing their teams.
AI is already changing this. Owner.com and Databricks are using AI simulations to run their reps through role-playing scenarios — giving sellers 10X more practice with perfectly calibrated difficulty levels and instant feedback. This results in reps who enter real conversations far better prepared and more confident.
These same AI systems that analyze performance in simulations will soon assess coachability during hiring. They’ll measure how quickly someone absorbs feedback, adapts their approach, and improves over time. Instead of discovering six months later that your new rep can't take direction, you know upfront who will actually develop with coaching.
If we scale this across the industry, we'll see a world where sellers get dramatically better coaching than ever before. I can see more people hitting targets in that world.
So, where does this leave us?
We set out to find new AI capabilities in GTM and see if they could counter the brutal reality of increasing competition. Jordan's challenge sent me down this path, and honestly, it changed my mind.
I've been consistently pessimistic about GTM metrics getting worse. But these two examples—prospecting with real-time insights and AI-powered coaching at scale — show we're building a genuine counterforce to the noise and competition.
Both capabilities are compelling and ready for adoption. And there's more coming as AI continues advancing.
But here's the thing…use cases are useless unless they're used. Adoption will make the difference between companies that thrive and those that fall further behind.
The pessimists will point to how slowly we typically adopt new technology. They're missing something crucial which is that our GTM community is more connected than ever. Ideas spread faster now. What works at Owner.com gets amplified in days, not years. That’s our true superpower.