Zach Lagod

The future of the GTM application layer is a world where every single data point is accessible in one interface. Right now, revenue teams are operating inside a maze of disconnected systems. Salesforce for pipeline. Gong for calls. HubSpot for marketing. Clari for forecasting. Outreach for sequences. Product data somewhere else. Support tickets somewhere else. Every question requires a swivel chair and a ticket to RevOps. Sound familiar? CROs are not short on data. They are short on time, trust, and speed. We have normalized a broken operating model where frontline leaders wait days or weeks for answers that should be available in seconds. By the time insights arrive, the moment to act has already passed. This is not a tooling problem. It is an application layer problem. The next generation of GTM platforms will not be another dashboard or reporting layer. They will unify every signal across sales, marketing, product, and support into a single command interface. One place to ask questions. One place to execute. One place to understand what is really happening in the business right now. When every data point is accessible in one interface, RevOps stops being a ticket desk and becomes a strategic engine. Sellers stop guessing. Leaders stop reacting. The organization moves at the speed of reality instead of the speed of internal process. The CRO of the future will not manage systems. They will command outcomes. And the companies that build for that future will leave the rest of the GTM stack behind.

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The 4 Levers of Sales Velocity. 🧮 To grow revenue, RevOps engineers look for which lever to pull: 1. More opportunities? 2. Higher deal value? 3. Better win rates? 4. Shorter cycles? Which lever are you pulling this quarter? 👇 #GTM #GTMEngineer #RevOps #SalesOps

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Reminder for MM AEs: buyers *appreciate* when you are prescriptive with your process (how they evaluate your product, how you engage evaluators). They already have a million things going on. Optimizing how they run an evaluation cycle (who to loop in when, what to test for at what time, whether to do X or Y and when) of a novel technology, particularly a new category of tech, is something they will generally love to offload to a sales team... in fact, they expect you to do so. This a large part of why you have a job (being an outsourced, assertive project manager), and the sales teams who are more prescriptive with them, educating them on how to evaluate this type of tech and what resources are available from your side or not, while maintaining a *trusted advisor* level of rapport so they feel safe to follow your lead, will steer how they evaluate all their options... yours and the competition. Take advantage of this and be (respectfully) dominant & prescriptive in your conversations with them, while keeping it clear you're 100% looking out for the best outcome for them, be it with your product or not. The art of doing this is one of the arts of sales. The only time this isn't the case is if you're selling to a uniquely organized team, often only found at larger Enterprise accounts where there's an RFP process and a team of evaluators who have careers doing this with new technology and are stubborn about how they run their process. And even then ... If anyone disagrees, I'd be curious to learn why.

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Most AEs are trained for the sales process. Almost none were trained for the execution layer. Activity targets. Pipeline coverage. More meetings and demos. Greater “momentum.” Run enough volume and something eventually closes. And to be fair …that worked when capital was free. You hit quota. So no one questioned the system. But many of the people sitting in your pipeline were never capital allocators. No economic ownership. Or mandate to fund anything. Limited reason to justify a business case internally. Just interest. Meanwhile, deals with real potential quietly lose priority when finance gets involved. Not because the product wasn’t strong. Because no one translated the solution into an investment the business could justify funding. That’s the execution layer. Where projects are evaluated on expected return, risk, payback, and impact on cash flow. Most sellers never adjust when the deal reaches that layer. They keep running process… …after the evaluation criteria has already changed. So the deal looks healthy in CRM. Good meetings. Positive feedback. Engaged stakeholders. Then the project loses priority. Interest is not a funding event. Capital allocation is. And capital discipline is tightening. Billions are flowing into AI infrastructure and data centers. That capital has to come from somewhere. It’s coming from your deal. That raises the bar for everything else competing for funding. Including yours. By 2027, average performance won’t just lose more deals. It will lose credibility earlier in the conversation. Because the execution layer requires economic judgment …not more activity. Most AEs were trained to generate pipeline. Very few were trained to generate investable projects. That gap is starting to show up in win rates, deal size, and which opportunities survive finance review. This isn’t a new sales methodology. It’s the decision framework executives already use. Execution layer fluency isn’t table stakes anymore. It’s the price of admission to the conversations that actually close. P.S. The execution layer is the phase of a capital decision where finance evaluates expected return, payback period, risk, and impact on cash flow. Many deals don’t die before this moment. They die inside it because the AE never learned to operate there.

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