Most companies think their go-to-market is solid. It’s not.

In this episode, Dale Zwizinski of Revenue Reimagined breaks down why AI will not fix a broken GTM foundation. It will expose it or amplify it.

We dive deep into why startups and growth-stage companies skip stabilization, rush toward scale, and avoid pressure-testing their ICP, value proposition, and sales motion. Dale explains the four stages of the Go-to-Market Gap framework, why repeatability cannot happen without foundations, and how AI should be used to eliminate blank-page work, not replace strategic thinking.

You’ll learn:

1. Why founders overestimate their GTM maturity
2. The difference between stabilization, foundation, repeatability, and scale
3. How AI can accelerate GTM work without creating chaos
4. Why most companies never revisit their ICP or value prop
5. How to build a human + agent collaboration model for 2026

If you care about building repeatable revenue in a rapidly shifting market, this conversation is essential.

🔗 Connect with Dale on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalezwizinski/

🔗 Visit Revenue Reimagined: https://www.revenue-reimagined.com/

🔗 Run the GTM Gap Report for your company: https://www.revenue-reimagined.com/gtm-gap

🎙 Subscribe for more conversations on AI, go-to-market strategy, and building modern revenue engines.

Dale, when you look across the startup and growth stage companies that you work with, what is the biggest, most common illusion that founders have about their go-to-market?

And I don't even know if it's just like founders and growth companies now, because I think this is happening all over the place.

They just think they have a

better grasp on the market, their product, the value proposition.

They think they have it nailed.

And maybe they did like a year ago or like two years ago for more growth companies.

But it's changing so quickly that like I recommend every quarter that you're pressure testing what we are calling go-to-market foundations, which is ICP, buying persona, value proposition.

There's so many different products coming to market.

There's so many different processes coming to market.

Like you just got to, you always got to pressure test it and see who's your competitors.

Is this still resonating with your customers?

Does that even make sense anymore?

So I think that's the big one.

And then I think if I talk about founders and startup companies and, you know, in your growth stage, they haven't documented anything.

Like if founder has

been able to do founder-led sales.

They can sell to anybody.

They have more passion about their product than anybody else.

But to get that passion into somebody else is very good.

It's all in their head, right?

I mean, I've heard that countless times.

It's all up here.

So, and I think we both think this way, like those documents are, you should always be iterating on them.

Why do you think people don't iterate on them?

Is it just because too busy, too hard, don't have time?

And

Why is it changing so fast?

Is that because of AI?

Is there other stuff coming in that's causing us to change so fast?

There's 2 parts to that question.

The first part is, I think it's all of what you said.

It is hard.

So we just went through it with a client of ours.

It took from start to finish about 3 months because you're in and out of it.

It's not like you can completely have focused time all the time on it.

So we did like a value prop ICP buying persona workshop with them.

That led to all the executives.

This is about a $100 million company.

The problem was they needed to change.

It was like a managed services group.

And we needed to get really narrow and niche versus spreading it out so much.

And so the CEO, the head of sales, the head of marketing, in their case, the head of people, there was a lot of people involved in the conversation.

And to get all the perspectives and put all that together,

you have to make sure that you're getting all that together.

It's a long period of time.

And then like you get it done and you're like, okay, you put a bookmark together, you put it in SharePoint, Google Docs, wherever you're putting it, and then you move on.

And so that's part of it, the timing, there's a lot of effort to it.

And then I think people get burnt on it.

And then like something will shift in the market.

Like it could be

a new competitor in the market.

It could be like Uberization of something happening.

It could be any market dynamic that's happening.

And if you haven't like revisited your value prop and ICP, you could be sending the best messaging in the world to the wrong people.

Right.

So it's like, everything is bounced off of that.

And then I think this has been happening

probably for about two or three years where go-to-market is changing so rapidly and quickly.

It started, it didn't even start with AI.

It started with automation a little bit, and then it started with, people, like buyers got smarter.

There was just more data, there was more information.

So, you know, 10 years ago, buyers needed salespeople.

Like, this is so cliche to say, but they really needed people to have, to get the information.

Now,

They get the information all the time.

If you go to buy a piece of software or you want something, yeah, you may go to a website, but then you're going to check your network.

You're going to find out, like, have other people used it?

You're going to get like the real real on it versus like what the salesperson is saying.

And there's G2, there's Gartner Quadrants, there's all these things out there that you can get all of this third-party validated information about these things you're buying.

And the problem with that third-party validation is that's all bought is paid for.

Like you manipulate all of that stuff, right?

But at least it gives you.

You could see what it's bought or paid across all the different companies you're thinking about.

And that was the evaluation point.

That was like five years ago.

And then AI started kicking in.

And then it's like, I remember the whole motion of your network sales.

And a lot of people come to us because they want us to sell their products because we're in clients all the time doing a lot of this work.

And so to me, today, the go-to-market should be tech-enabled sales.

not technology forward, but you have services like leading and managing it in parallel.

Like services was such like, not a bad word, but it was more of a, like the valuation on services was much lower than technology.

And I actually think there's an equilibrium happening now where you can't scale services because it's people knowledge execution, but that's going into the AI space a little bit.

And then the products are just like, everything sounds the same, but I get pitched on a weekly basis.

And I'm like, okay, you sound like, have you heard about this company?

And they're like, no.

I'm like, go check them out.

You guys have the same UI because you guys have built it off of like the same UI stack.

It's all blah, it's all normalized.

Yeah.

But it's changing now.

Like I used to say quarterly.

I may even say like monthly now, like I'm getting like new stuff happening.

Use the whole open claw to open claw to claw code.

Like all this stuff is happening.

And I think people that aren't tinkering will be left behind.

So you kind of led into this a little bit.

Let's go down this path a little bit.

Kind of talk to me a little bit about Revenue Reimagined and kind of how you and Adam

are helping these companies, right?

Like, what are you doing and how are you helping them with their GTM motion and stack?

And I know you've got some frameworks and platforms that you're thinking about.

So kind of lead us there too, as you kind of tell people kind of how you started this and where it's going.

And I don't want to leave out our third partner.

So we have three partners, operating partners in the business, me, Adam, and Jake Rennie.

So Jake came in about two years ago.

So if I rewind all the way back to my origin story,

I was a CRO, VP of sales.

Actually, even before that, I was a coder, so I used to code.

I did implementation work.

I didn't even start my career in sales.

I liked working with clients more, and I liked the front end of it.

I didn't like being told what we sold that was wrong, because that was, in 99, I was doing implementation work, and I remember very clearly,

The customer is like, I never want to see your salesperson in this office ever again.

All he wants is this commission.

It was like the YTP bug.

And at that moment, I was like, We can do better as a sales community.

And that's kind of like my entre into sales.

And then, so the next 25 years has all been selling.

I love the startup world.

I get the startup bug early.

And I also worked for companies like Fair Isaac Corporation and Oracle.

So I had some big motion enablement behind me, but I really loved the startup company.

So about 10 years ago, I had been doing a bunch of startup work and then COVID hit.

And what I was realizing is all of these founders were like grasping.

They're just grasping all the time.

And so they would get me on a phone and it'd be like, I was being pitched like an investor.

We have a great product, we have a great pipeline, and I know it's not true.

Like, I know what you're saying is not true, but you can only ask themselves, and then you'd get into, yeah, and then you'd get in the middle of it, and it was like, Yeah, this isn't going to work out.

Like, six months later, you're paying me too much money.

Like, you have too many broken things in the business.

Like, I'm going to work on all the broken pieces, and then...

you're not going to be happy that the numbers aren't working out because we don't have the foundation built.

So what I decided was to go out on my own, because I was feeling like I was doing things sequentially, one company at a time, like great products, becoming shelfware.

I was just like, there's got to be a better way.

So I started out on my own, just doing what was called fractional at the time.

And what I realized is I could help multiple founders at one point in time, and I could do

like my lane of genius and the excellence and then let them kind of go.

And then one of my co-founders, Adam, was having some of the same challenges and his, me and his story is for another podcast, but we ended up starting a podcast together called the Revenue Remanagement Podcast just to drive top of funnel.

So I convinced him to go out on his own.

I was going out on my own.

We were kind of separate on our own together.

And then we got a, he got a client that he wanted me to help with.

And so we shared the revenue and then it was like a testing place to then build Revenue Reimagined as a company versus a podcast.

In that space, what I realized from my perspective and also from the client perspective, it was better for both people.

I don't know about other fractionals or people in the market, but you get in your own echo chamber anyway.

You're like, you're not spreading out and you're always asking other solopreneurs or

go to market operators or consultants, like, how would you do this?

Hey, I need a comp plan on that.

What does your sales process look like?

You're doing that work and it's all like, but it's fragmented so you don't have concentrated effort on it.

And then the customer only gets one perspective.

So the way we work is you have a primary and then you have a copilot operating partner.

So you basically get 2 CROs

And actually a third one, because the third ones, we're always having conversations about clients.

So we can always bounce ideas, whether it's enablement, a compensation plan, going from mid-market to enterprise.

So we actually have a built-in black hat thinking within our organization.

So you give a recommendation and here's maybe one or two alternative ones.

We think this one, but you know your business better than we do.

One of these other ones might work.

That's cool.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I think it works out for everybody.

It's still super labor intensive, which is a

about 18 months ago, maybe a little bit less than a, I started thinking like, how do we take all of our frameworks, thought processes, things that we're doing, and start enabling that through AI and the AI process?

And it was like before a lot of this work was happening, but we knew we had to automate it or else we were going to, like, we can only get four to six clients at any given time based on the workload.

So like, how can we get to 10?

Or how can

And this is my second iteration, like at the end of last year, I was thinking, what?

When consultants or fractionals or operators leave the companies, like what's the shelf life of everything we've done for the last 12 months?

And my hypothesis is that shelf life is like two or three months.

because they'll go back to doing the old things.

The docs in Google Drive, they don't know exactly how to read it.

There's a little bit of gray interpretation and the wording and like things are changing.

And because it's evolving so fast, like it's getting more.

You said it, every quarter, they should be reevaluating it.

And people change and new people come in and like they're not querying it and like, yeah, checking their thesis and validating their hypothesis and all.

Not only from the customer's perspective,

But from a technology perspective and a market dynamics, like that's what people are not understanding.

Like, I don't know if you ever saw the movie The Perfect Storm, but it's like, that's happening in go to market right now where there's like so many dynamics that are changing.

And it's very hard to continue to grow when you don't have stability at certain levels.

So like, you got to keep something constant to grow.

And without the constant piece of it, we are, we're shifting the ground all the time.

And so the next evolution is getting some of our thought processes into AI so people, so we can run better.

Like tech-enabled services, once again, I want to run AI so that we can do, we have a four-step process in the framework, the go-to-market gap.

So it's stabilization, foundation, repeatability, scalability.

Those 4 pillars were just an easy way to describe it to the CEO, to the revenue leaders, to the founders.

The problem that we ran into about 12 months ago is like we got stuck in stabilization for so long and we never got enough foundation building to get to repeatability.

Like everybody wants to be repeatable, repeatable process, repeatable top of funnel, repeatable forecasting.

Like this is what they want.

The problem

going back to when I first started doing a lot of this work and realizing it is you have to stabilize everything.

You have to build a right foundation, and then you can get to repeatability.

So you can't skip these stages.

They may be working in parallel, but you can't skip them.

And so what we would see is we'd go in and we would do a go-to-market audit, but then all of a sudden we're like, right person, right seat jobs will be done.

And we're realizing

the people they have in place, or they realized before they brought us in, the people they have in place can't do what they want them to do.

So then they're like, we need to hire new people.

And it's like, okay, great.

Where's your job description?

Here's one from two years ago.

And it's like, you read it and it's like, okay, you can't get there from here.

So now you're writing a new job description.

Then you're doing the hiring process.

Okay, what's your interview process look like?

Oh, we don't really have one.

Like, no questions, no rubric, no scorecard.

I'm like, okay, so now you're building that.

So now you're pulling a string in like this huge ball of yarn.

And then it's like, where's your onboarding documents?

And they're like, oh, here it is.

And you look at it.

It's like, log in to Slack, log in to e-mail, log in, like, here's your laptop.

I'm like, yes.

Like, here's the bathroom.

But they have nothing around like what's your go to market enablement?

Like what's the ICP?

What's the value proposition?

How are you going to role play for the salespeople?

What does that content look like?

So all of that stuff is like not, it doesn't exist.

So now you're building all that stuff.

So now you can see like we're stuck in stabilization just from we have to hire one additional person.

With most, I'm just thinking about my experience with that.

The hardest part of that is coming up with something to start sharing around and reacting to, right?

And that's probably the part that AI is most best at.

You could dump a bunch of stuff, throw it out there, and it'll get you 80% of something.

It's not going to be 100% right.

But then all of those conversations and people can react to it.

But before analysis paralysis or like, where do we start or how do we get there?

Like people don't know.

But once you have like, all right, here's your onboarding plan for an employer, here's your

ICP, great.

Well, this isn't right.

This needs to be tweaked a little bit.

It's easy to kind of get to that final 20%, right?

Yeah, so that's exactly it.

So rewind 12 months ago, there was no AI.

AI wasn't really existing, even with some of the ChatGPT stuff, it wasn't good enough.

Now Claude's doing some really good stuff.

You have projects and you can start like segmenting them out.

We have a team plan inside of Claude.

I've started to build out like open Claude to try to like help myself because we go into sprints and deliverables in the month and there's a lot of moving parts that we end up having.

So like how do we organize all that stuff?

But back to like when we leave.

I don't want all of the work that we've done to go away.

So how can we enable them once we leave?

And so that's the next evolution of what we're thinking about and where we're going to go is that process with them, because there's a lot of goodness that has gone on so that they can rerun go-to-market foundations again, which will give them an evaluation of their current ICP versus the new ICP based on the new data that we have.

And does that

even make sense for them.

And then they can iterate on that, even async.

Like maybe you don't need to get in person, because what we did for the client that took about between 6 to 12 weeks in full time, like scheduling meetings, getting on site with people, that kind of stuff, takes me 15 minutes now.

From a starting point perspective, like, okay,

The other problem is they don't have it documented.

So just to get it documented is a pain in the ****.

And so now we have a starting point that we can all talk about.

You react to this.

We'll give you best practices from what we see with companies like you that are in this space.

Well, actually, I'm pulling it right off their website.

So let's go into that.

Yeah, because I've seen kind of your gap report.

You take this ingestion of their website to kind of generate that first path edit, and then and then from there it's all reaction meetings and conversations.

Is that is that kind of?

Yeah, not totally.

So I was just talking with an investment group yesterday, and they had hired like a fractional marketing group.

And so I was, and we know the marketing group, they're super good.

And I was talking with, they connect us with the investor.

And so the investor gave me, they're like, here, here's one that we just rebuilt.

So I took the website, ran it through the system, and took the report.

And so we build a PDF file and a gamma presentation, because one's a high level, one's a bit more detailed.

And he said, send this to me and the marketing group and let's see what happens.

Because it's really the way the world is looking at you through your front door with your website.

And so if it's wrong, the problem could be a little bit AI and hallucination.

I'm not going to, that does happen.

But it could just be like, you need to change the content on your website.

Because even if you've changed all the go-to-market foundational pieces, has it

percolated through your messaging with your sales team, your website content, like all that type of stuff.

So the initial piece is really like, does this work for your current state?

And then you can say, okay, here's a document.

Does this make, what doesn't make sense here?

Do you have other documents that we can ingest to make it stronger, make it better?

It's a jumping off point.

And I think

Whether it's with go to market, it's with AI, it's with writing a paper in college.

I have two kids in college right now.

It's the initial idea to get you moving that sticks most people.

And what I'm hearing you say, like, and I see this so many times, you're a subject matter expert in kind of how to get this ball rolling, go to market.

You've built tools in place that take these best practices, start with a website of a company, inject it all in,

it through your filter and like, here you go, we've got a starting point.

We should probably shout out right now that anybody that wants to go, we'll make sure it's in the show notes, go run it on their website.

It's revenue generated.

There's a link to get the GTM gap report.

You can get one of those running your company for free and kind of test drive that.

But what I also think I heard you say what you

is really interesting is great.

There is this big engagement that companies have to engage with you 12 weeks, probably not cheap, right?

For all of that time.

But if you can get that going faster, but now it's like, you're talking about how do we grow our company and our team?

And instead of doing with people, can we do that with AI and models and training and turn this into an ongoing thing with the service?

That's super interesting.

Like, let's build you this thing that you can keep communicating with.

It's going to keep updating your files.

And you've got this living document that we've trained and set up so that you can give it to new employees and you kind of always know, all right, this is where we're saying the ICP is an example.

100%, and it goes a little bit further than that for the company.

So decisions are made based on data that you have at the current moment.

So whether it's top of funnel, churn, GRR, NRR, AR, like all these words get thrown around, right?

And so we're making decisions at a point in time.

And then three months later, something is happening and you may want to make a different decision.

Well,

If you don't bounce it up against your original hypothesis, how do you know if you're going in the right direction?

Like you may just be, because this is what happens with a lot of startup companies.

You're going, everything's going pretty well, and then you hit a bump in the road.

And then the board of directors or the investor goes, this isn't working.

This is complete ********.

Like you guys should be doing this stuff.

And so then they push you on a path that is conflicting with what we've agreed to.

Most companies probably don't even write down the original hypothesis to even remember what it is, right?

A 100%.

And there's so many micro decisions that are being made in that motion.

Like the original conversation may not be was valid, but if we can capture those micro decisions or micro conversations or big, big decisions, and then an investor comes in and says, okay, I know that we told you guys to go do

X, but we now want you to go do Y, because we've heard from the gurus of GTM that that's what you should be doing.

And you take that new path and you push it into this engine, and it comes back and says, well, that's a great idea.

However, your original hypothesis is this, and if you go down this path, you may

short-term have, a bump in, but in long-term, like there's trade-offs in every decision we're making.

And so how can we make it so that those trade-offs are at least understood?

Doesn't mean that we're not going to do what they're saying.

It just means that we're going to have full data and transparency through the decision.

I'm curious, like you kind of go in here, you've set up a brain for them, right?

Of this is your go-to-market strategy and plan.

Just to be clear, we're not doing this today.

Like just to be clear, like this is

This is a vision that we're building towards because the challenge is real on the infrastructure side because you got to make sure data is secure.

Like there's a lot of other pieces.

Like I'm good at the front end pieces of this thing.

I'm not the best on the back end, vector databases, security, government.

Like there's other pieces to it.

For now, what we're doing is we're creating the technology, the AI stack internally for Revenue Reimagine.

making sure everything's working, making sure we can do things very quickly, which would enable us to then potentially hire junior people.

We now match up the junior person with us.

We do the audit with the company.

And then because we have everything set up in the AI piece, the junior director, managing director, whatever, can do all the work.

Kind of knows those conversation questions and the guardrails to kind of keep them on.

100%.

So we're building it internally for us.

And then if it is good enough, we will push it out to everybody.

But the vision is that I believe consulting or fractional or operators as we know them today are going to be obsolete.

And if you can create a moat where you have something where people can continuously get value out of the initial investment, that is where it's going to go.

Like, is it expensive up front?

Maybe, not, depending on how you look at it.

You get 2 CROs for the cost of 1.

Like, okay, so that's one thing.

But then when we leave, like, is there a motion where you can continue to get value?

Yes, there'll be some kind of subscription cost or something, but it's at a micro scale to the actual engagement.

And then at some point in time, if you need to bring it, like, let's say we get you to foundations and we start getting repeatability.

Scalability is like, I'm going to go into a new market, I'm going to go upmarket, I'm going to go geography, and then they could bring us back in.

But we don't need to skip a beat because we actually have all the data, like the data is still running.

Well, and I think the fundamental thing that I'm hearing you say that a lot of companies struggle with right now, working with AI and why all these AI things fail is because I call it AI onboarding, right?

They're not doing the proper AI onboarding just like a new employee.

You've got to

You've got to have all of this stuff in a way that they can consume and work with.

And you're building the groundwork now to have all of that.

You know you'll be able to do other stuff in the future.

Maybe you haven't done that yet, but it doesn't matter because go-to-market has to have a foundation.

Well, all of this has to have a foundation of knowledge to work from.

I'll double click a little further.

It's actually not only just for the AI, it's actually just the way you do go-to-market.

Like we're complicating this thing way too much.

Like

Is it complicated?

Yes.

Can we make it simple to get stable and foundation built?

Yes.

It's documentation.

It's why you built a product, what's the value of the product, and who are you selling to?

And why are you different than everyone else in the marketplace?

If you can't answer those three simple questions, don't go into business.

Why do you think people make it so much more complicated?

Is it because they don't really understand it before they're on the train running down the tracks or

They want to sound smart?

What is it?

I think part of it is they have a concept and an idea for a product or a service that they believe is like no one else has thought of or is built on top of something else.

And then you get into the mode, like as simple as everything I just said is, it's very difficult to execute on.

Because when you have to really ask yourself the question, can you describe your value in 15 words or less that no one else can describe?

I get complete blanks there.

It's like, then they go into a dissertation on like, why every feature and functionality is better than the competitor.

And I'm like, no, why are you better than anybody else that they can't say?

And it's very difficult because it's noisy.

There's a lot of noise in the market.

And they're like, this competitor says it, but they don't really do it.

And like, there's a whole bunch of that happening as well.

And then trying to get your entire team on board with that exact messaging and understanding the why of it all too.

Like, that's the whole other level.

Because you just, because thinking back, 15 years ago, I was the 1st 100 employee at HubSpot, and that was a superpower, right?

Everybody knew the power of inbound marketing.

Everybody knew that Brian Alligan's origin story.

Because you spent a month, your first month as an employee, getting that pounded into your brain to the point where a sales rep or a customer success person that you have on the phone with you is telling you the exact same story.

That's a leader conversation.

The problem is many of these founders are not leaders.

They are founders that have great ideas, which is why they hire us to come in to build that out and make sure it's cohesive.

Because what ends up happening is if you have a technical founder or a very operational founder, it's not easy for people to digest what's actually being said.

They have a different mindset in a lot of these things.

So it's like, how do you distill it down where everyone that I talk to in the organization can say the same thing all the time?

It's very difficult.

It's not easy.

I make it sound simpler than it really is from an execution perspective, but if you don't do those simple pieces, you're never going to get to building the foundation, getting to repeatability.

Like one of the things that people don't realize is they're like, you've run sales teams before, you've been successful, you should just be able to come in here and like do it here.

And that's like, that's just not the case.

Like every situation is a little bit different, every situation.

So you just have to understand what are you trying to accomplish, where are you trying to go,

And what value are you delivering to the customer?

If you're selling, I don't care if you're selling $100 widget, are you generating 4 to $500 in value?

If you can't say yes to that question, then why are we having a conversation?

And they don't look at it that way.

They're like, I got to sell something because I need to make a commission.

Or I got to sell something so I can get a better valuation for my company.

They never say like, I think initially that's why founder-led sales work so well.

They understand the problem so well and the domain expertise so well that they can talk the customer's language and they can say, like, listen, I know I've been in your situation.

You have a little bit of empathy.

This is what I was struggling with.

This is why I built this product or service.

And here's where I know we're going to deliver value for you.

And you remind me, I had a boss one time tell me a long time ago, like, don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.

But he also said, everybody gets promoted to their level of incompetency.

You keep working up the food chain until you hit this role where like you were great as the individual contributor.

Now trying to be the sales manager, it's a completely different skill set and you suck at it.

And you have to relearn how to like manage teams instead of like succeeding despite them.

That's a great way to look at it because

A lot of revenue leaders, founders, CEOs believe that they have all the answers.

And if they realize that they did not have all the answers and they only really need to figure out the people put in place to get those answers.

And in go-to-market, unfortunately, the problem gets exacerbated because if the person hiring doesn't understand how to hire a go-to-market position, it could cost them their company.

Like it could literally cost them their company because you give them enough rope,

And then all of a sudden you realize it's not working.

They've been in front of all your clients and customers.

They, potentially bad name.

There's a lot of different things.

But even hiring a bad salesperson could cost a company half $1,000,000.

And now you got to go start again.

Like now you got to go hire again.

And then they're like, oh, I don't want to go hire again.

I got to get a recruiter.

Then I get a ramp.

Like it's a big problem.

So let's get a little bit back to the AI stuff as we kind of start to wrap things up here.

Like I'm curious, as someone who goes in and works with companies to kind of help them write their go-to-market motion, how has working with Agentic and AI kind of helped you in your capacity to do that?

Yeah, it's a great question.

It's allowing us to not do a lot of the busy work.

So we can take our thought process, go through the iteration, and the document part of it, which is really what the client wants, can get built out

without us having to start from scratch.

One of the things I mentioned earlier, the hardest thing that people, whether you're writing a paper or writing a go-to-market strategy, is the starting point.

Like how do you start this thing?

That's where AI is helping out a lot.

And then you can build skills inside a Claude or open, like wherever the idea is, and a project to keep memory in so it doesn't forget it.

So

It's not like 50 First Dates or Nemo where it's like starting all over again.

You have a contextual foundation that you're building on top of.

And so when I go back in and I have a second conversation, I can say, based on our last conversations, I now need to do this.

So I'll give you a perfect example.

So we've been building comp plans for a client and we've been, it's the first time they've really had

a commission-based comp plan.

So they've moved from OKRs to commission-based.

And so there's been a lot of iteration on like, what does it look like?

When are we going to pay them out?

How does that feel?

And so every time I get new parameters, I'll just say, OK, I know we have the initial comp plan, but here are the new parameters for the comp plan.

Go rebuild it for me.

And so now I don't have to go rebuild everything or find where all the nuances are.

Like, it's just like I go,

execute that process, and then I go on to something else.

So actually, AI is great for people that have PDH.

Well, before we started recording here, like you and I talked a little bit about 2025, it's kind of a lot of experimentation with AI.

And 2026 is kind of the year that like results start to happen and actually matter.

And I'm curious with that, what experiments or things that you try that really stuck and what are ones that like totally failed and like, we can't do this and we might not be able to do this for a while?

Messaging is still a little wonky in AI because I know there's a lot of people doing personalization.

There's a lot of people like the AI SDR, like the thing it's still, it's still out.

Like I have a client right now going into multiple conversations with vendors.

We have partnered with somebody that is building AI employees.

So like

Just like you would have a regular employee, you would have an AI employee reporting to a human being type of thing that would be responsible for its output.

But I don't think we're there yet.

And I don't think that AI SDR as it stands today is going to be long-term.

Even if we see success in the short term, I think it's just going to get overrun.

Like everything sales and marketing like puts really ****** stuff into.

Things that have worked for us are

like rapidly prototyping things that we can build on top of like HubSpot, for example.

Like we're building things very quickly to show the, like we can show the customer what we mean without having to like document everything, then have someone go build, like that process is very long.

And I'll give you an example of that as well.

So a lot of times with our clients, we just have them do smart goals or like what you're doing for the week and

It's not necessarily that I want to go into HubSpot all the time, and I don't want to necessarily store it, but I want to capture all the things that they've said that they're going to do.

And then, so that's on Monday.

And then on Friday, we capture it, we look at it, like, did we hit it?

Did we not hit it?

And over time, you want to understand, like, have they, like, what they're saying in their goals, can they hit them on a regular basis?

And those smart goals should be ratcheting up to your quota and revenue, right?

But over time,

It's hard to capture that because you're capturing it in Slack or you're putting in an e-mail, like whatever it is.

So like, just like forecasting, can they really do that?

You don't really want all that stuff in HubSpot or Salesforce or name your CRM, but you as a leader, you want to run that.

So we built a quick app for them to just capture it, run it, and then over time you can analyze it.

Like that was impossible.

You could build it, you could build a spreadsheet and but there's no analytic, like there's no like mini database.

Try this, see if it works, we can iterate or throw it away.

Yeah, and if they like it, then you can, go through a process of hardening it and making it like part of the stuff.

So if you're jumping in to work with a new Series A, Series B company that GTM's broken today,

what is the first thing you do in the first kind of 30, 60 days to kind of get everybody on board and kind of get them running?

We do a go-to-market audit, first thing.

Like the first year of the company, we didn't do that.

We're like, yeah, we'll take the business.

We can figure it out.

And then scope would create, we'd go all over the place.

And so we do a go-to-market audit.

We do interviews with the executives, interviews with the individual stakeholders, individual contributors.

We get the full picture.

Then we say, based on everything we've heard and our knowledge in the space and what we've seen, this is what we believe your priorities are.

Now, some of them may match, may not.

We do a readout.

The executives, the CEO, or the revenue leader says, yes, this works.

No, that doesn't work.

And we agree on what the priority is.

And then we go build four-week sprints just like we would in engineering space.

And we say, so right now we're building our sprints for March.

What is it that we want to accomplish in March based on your go-to-market motion?

And the challenge a little bit with that is that things get interjected very quickly.

Like, that was important, but now this is important.

It's like, okay, that's great, but sometimes you got to come off the sprint to get onto the sprint.

Like, so we have a mechanism to help that process.

We're not great at it, by the way, because

We want to help our customers do everything.

So then we just spin up more people and that is a whole nother problem.

But yes, go to market motion, the audit into a readout, into sprints, and then just start executing.

Like we're in sales meetings, we're in sales process.

Like we have our customers' e-mail addresses, like we're embedded, which is challenging as well, because now it's just a time, it's timing.

So timing becomes very difficult.

So speaking of the audit,

Let's kind of wrapping things up.

Like how could people find you if they've got questions?

What's the best way?

Talk, you know, they want to come run the TTM gap, like kind of give the whole kind of lat long, all of that good stuff.

Yeah, You can always find me on LinkedIn.

I'm writing tons of content on AI, go to market.

All the time.

Revenue-reimagine.com is our website.

There's a thing there called the go-to-market gap, although we are rebranding and redoing our website, which I'm doing all in AI, by the way.

So you can go there.

Adam J or Jake Rennie, my two other business partners, hit them up.

We all have a bit of a different personality and vision on it.

Jake was the global head of enablement for Adobe, so he does a lot of training, enablement type stuff.

Adam's very operational in nature, so he's like HubSpot certified and Salesforce certified and like can execute on an operational piece.

And then I'm doing a lot of strategy and AI pieces for the group.

So that trifecta are all our lanes of genius.

And all I would say is anyone that's doing these things, find your lane of genius.

And if you're not in your lane of genius, find someone that can sidecar you on your lane of genius.

I love it.

Dale, thanks so much for joining me today.

Any final closing thoughts?

I'll leave them with you.

Anything you want to leave everybody with as we kind of wrap this one?

Yeah, I think just get back to basics.

Like get back to foundational 101, just like you would go to market, just like you would do with AI and test, work, do the effort, like try it out.

You're going to fail.

It's okay.

Failing is not the end.

It's just the beginning of a new iteration.

I love that.

Love that.

It's okay to fail.

Failing's good.

And with that, everybody, go fail something this week and learn from it because you learn more when you fail when you succeed.

And until next time, have a great week.

Thank you, everybody.