3 lessons from a week off, before the plan locks

With about 10 selling weeks left before the year closes, and next year’s plan already due, the operators who start executing now (in October) are the ones who hit the number they’re about to set.

From my week: I spent part of a week off thinking through a coaching concept I’ve been building for over a year, not for spare time, but because the break was the first quiet stretch I’d had in months.

My take: I used to think planning started when finance sent the template, in late November. It doesn’t. The plan rushed together in week 2 of December is the plan that stalls your first quarter, and I’ve watched that exact lag cost 3 different teams their January.

The rule: The plan that starts in October ships in January. The plan that starts in December ships in March.

Sources: 5 steps to build next year’s plan early enough to hit it

Access this GTMcraft Play [here]

Lesson 1: Protect the input before you protect the pipeline

I track 3 numbers now when I take time off: sleep, steps, HRV. Not because I’m chasing a wellness trend, I’m not, but because I wanted to know what 6 days actually does to the thing that makes every other decision this quarter possible, which is a clear head. The first night was the worst of the week, a 4-hour-32 stretch thanks to an early flight. By night 2 I was back over 9 hours, and the 7-day HRV average ended up the highest it has ever been. I came back with the clearest thinking I’ve had on how we cross this Q4, and it happened on a balcony, not at my desk.

My take: For years I took exactly 1 holiday a year, in the summer, and told myself that was enough. It wasn’t a decision, it was a default, and the calendar filling up with events, communities and a new coaching concept made it easier to keep deferring. What changed is not that I found more time. I protected 3 numbers instead of zero, and the strategic thinking showed up as a side effect, not the goal.

The European read: The 1-holiday-a-year habit is not a personal quirk, it is close to the regional default for operators who carry a number. We treat the break as the thing that can wait because everything else on the calendar insists it cannot. The irony is that the clearest thinking on the quarter almost never happens inside the quarter’s own meetings.

The rule: The input comes before the pipeline. You cannot out-plan a depleted operator.

You know it worked when: the first strategic idea of the week arrives somewhere other than your desk.

The play: 5 steps to turn your outbound Q4 plan into a capacity plan — built for your selling days, but run the same math on your own. Count your actual available hours before you set what you’ll build next, review it weekly the way the play reviews outbound capacity every Friday.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 2: You earn the informal channel, you don’t default into it

I’ve worked with a coach for close to 2 years, first on content, then on packaging 14 years in the trenches into something others could use. For most of that time we ran on a fixed biweekly call plus async updates in Notion. In the last few days/week we moved to WhatsApp, voice notes, texts, a call when something needed it, and the pace changed. Response time dropped, nothing got lost in a messy inbox, and it stayed useful because the trust was already built.

I saw the same pattern this week on the other side of the table. A handful of warm leads for a new coaching cohort had gone quiet after a LinkedIn message and a follow-up email, both reliably messy channels. The moment I followed up on WhatsApp instead, replies came back within the hour. Same person, same offer, different channel, and it only worked because the relationship had already earned it.

My take: It is tempting to read this as “move everything to WhatsApp,” and that is exactly the wrong read. The lesson is the sequence, not the tool. Trust first, informal channel second. Skip the first step and the same message on the same channel reads as presumptuous instead of convenient.

The European read: European buyers are more allergic to over-familiarity than the “just text me” culture that travels well from the US. The move is not to default to informal, it is to notice the exact moment credibility has been earned and switch only then.

The rule: You earn the informal channel. You cannot default into it.

You know it worked when: a contact who went quiet on email or LinkedIn responds within hours on the channel you switched to.

The play: 5 steps to run async selling that shortens the cycle

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 3: Map the job before you buy the agent

I spent part of the break listening to Jacco van der Kooij lay out a framework for AI and sellers: 1X modernizes the process, 2X offloads work to agents, 3X becomes a genuinely full-cycle operator. The order is the whole point. Skip to 2X before 1X is done and you’ve automated a broken process, faster.

I watched the same sequence at Personio, where I lead our international GTM org. Our CRO, Philip, presented on this exact question at Shift AI Europe in Barcelona this same week: don’t add AI to GTM, rebuild GTM around it. The number that stuck wasn’t the adoption rate, though 91% monthly active usage is real and public. It was the reframe: from “who’s using AI” to “what are we building once, for everyone,” only possible once the jobs, not the tools, are mapped. The agent hub across our AE and BDR teams exists because that mapping happened first.

My take: AI readiness gets sold as a tooling decision. It isn’t. It’s a process decision wearing a tooling costume. The teams that get this backwards spend real money proving it, one rep-built model at a time.

The European read: European teams often buy the caution around AI as a compliance story. It is rarely the real blocker. The real blocker is the same one engineering had before anyone touched a model: undefined process, now amplified instead of fixed.

The rule: Map the job before you buy the agent.

You know it worked when: adoption of a new AI tool outpaces the rollout announcement, because the team already knew exactly where it fit.

The play: 5 steps to fix the base before you point an agent at it

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

This week’s play to steal

Fixes: late-autumn planning that eats H1 before the first program fires, plus a plan sized by hiring first instead of the capacity you already have.

Best for: any operator who owns a number for next year and hasn’t started the plan yet, especially one still defaulting to more leads plus more hires.

Template: score your plan 1 point per signal, 5 means ready to present.

• Start is a full cycle before January, not the finance calendar.

• Ambition is capped by your own trend, not a wish.

• Every initiative has a cost, an impact, a date.

• The realistic-to-aggressive gap is named, not hidden.

• The plan is room-tested, not just announced.

Paste this into your AI:

You’re my annual planning analyst. Ask for my ramp time, program build time, average sales cycle, next year’s ambition, and 6-plus years of growth pace. Compute my activation lag and planning start date, draft a top-down model with 3 to 4 levers (including where AI-freed hours change the hiring math), build realistic and aggressive scenarios against my trend, cost each initiative, and give me 3 questions to pressure-test the plan with my team before I present it.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Why this matters now

About 10 selling weeks remain before the year closes, and the plan for next year is already due whether you’ve started it or not. Every operator reading this is weighing the same 3 trade-offs this week: protect your own capacity or burn through it, earn the trust that makes a relationship easy or keep forcing a formal channel, map the process or hand a broken one to an agent. None of these are new problems. What’s new is how little runway is left to get them right before the number you’re about to set becomes the number you’re stuck defending.

3 questions for the room

1. What’s the one input you’ve let slip this quarter that you’d never let slip in January?

2. Which relationship in your pipeline right now would answer faster on a channel you haven’t tried yet, because the trust is already there?

3. Which process in your GTM motion would an AI agent make worse right now, not better, because the job underneath was never mapped?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5.5; edited & approved by Koen

A few weeks ago a CRO at a 2M ARR company sent me a WhatsApp.

He was about to close a deal as big as his entire customer base. And he had nobody to think it through with.

We got on a 30-minute call. I told him what I would do in his seat.

Two weeks later he came back. He had made his call. The big deal got its own high-touch motion, so it did not put his 2M of SMB customers at risk.

Then he asked: “Is there any way you can coach me this way?”

The question always comes on WhatsApp

That question keeps coming. Never through a community. Always on WhatsApp, from someone with a board meeting on Tuesday.

I see the other side of it too. I host a community Slack with 150+ executives in it. It gets 1 question a month. My own playbooks get bookmarked and never opened.

Last month I asked 60+ founders on a stage if they know where their pipeline breaks. 1 hand stayed up.

Nobody at this stage has a content problem. You have a Tuesday problem: a revenue call on your desk this week, and nobody senior to run it by.

I write plays 3 times a week, so I say this with some self-awareness. Another playbook does not fix a Tuesday problem. A person who has made the call before does.

So I built what he asked for.

The Revenue Room

8 people, 1 quarter. European B2B SaaS founders between 1M and 10M ARR, and GTM leaders who own the number.

I tell you what I would do in your seat. You run it. No course, no content library, nothing to fall behind on.

• A hotline. A private group nobody outside it sees. Post the problem on your desk, any working day. You get my answer within 48 hours, plus whatever the other 7 have run into before. You never solve a complex one alone again.

• A 90-minute call every 2 weeks, case-led. You post your case 48 hours ahead and 3 cases get the floor. I tell you what I would do, what to stop doing and what to measure by Friday. Next call you come back with what happened.

• 1 private 60-minute session with me, placed where it moves your number most.

I have scaled B2B SaaS to 10M ARR 3 times, and I run a GTM org pushing toward 50M ARR, in Europe. You get what I am running this quarter, not what I remember from 2019.

How one case runs

Every case in the room fits on 1 screen. You can use the format this weekend, even if you never join.

1. The number. What you own this quarter, and where it stands today.

2. The call. The decision on your desk, in 1 sentence.

3. The options. The 2 or 3 moves you are weighing, and what each one costs.

4. What you already tried. And what happened.

5. The deadline. When the call has to be made, and who is waiting on it.

The answer comes back in 3 lines. What I would do. What I would stop doing. What to measure by Friday.

Write your own Tuesday problem in those 5 lines. Getting it onto 1 screen is half the work.

How the quarter runs

• Friday 23 October: the first call. You bring your Q4 number and whatever is in the way of it.

• November: the same rhythm, now on what you actually ran.

• December and January: we build your Q1 2027 plan, break over Christmas, and check that plan against your first numbers in the second week of January.

What is already on the table

These are the 4 topics on the table for the first call on 23 October:

1. The founding team, and how to test the click before anyone signs.

2. Moving from founder-led sales to a founding AE.

3. Building top-of-funnel pipeline when conversion is already solved.

4. Building an event community in a market drowning in events.

If yours sits next to one of these, you will not be the only one in the room with it.

What you walk out with

A quarter where no revenue call is made alone. A Q1 plan checked by people who carry a number themselves. And 7 peers whose numbers, motions and mistakes you know by name.

What is said in the room stays in the room.

Who gets a seat

Part of the room is already filled from my own network. I am not filling the rest first come, first served. The bar is simple:

• You own a number, and you can name what is in the way of it in 1 sentence.

• You run the work between calls. I work with you, not instead of you.

• You can protect 90 minutes every 2 weeks for a quarter.

It is not for you if you are below 1M ARR, or if you want a course. The plays stay free on Notion for that.

How to get a seat

5,000 EUR for the quarter, up front or in 3 monthly parts.

Reply to this email with 1 word:

• ROOM, plus 3 lines: your ARR, your motion, and the 1 thing in the way of your number. I will tell you straight whether the room is the right call, also if it is not.

• JANUARY, if the timing is wrong but you want to hear first when the Q1 2027 room opens.

I need your yes by Thursday 22 October, 18:00 CET. Then the room closes and we get to work on Friday morning.

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. If this is not for you, forward it to 1 founder who is making a revenue call alone this quarter. The regular Friday edition is back next week.

This week’s number 1 move

Pull your last 20 deals that reached Selection, where buyers compare vendors, and log each objection. Mark each one resolved, deferred or never said.

Deferred objections are the real lost deals. Your CRM shows them later as a reason code that says timing. Divide resolved by raised. That is your objection resolution rate, and most teams have never counted it.

Resolved means the buyer said so. A nod is deferred.

Then write one card for your top 5 objections. Each row holds the objection in the buyer’s words, the sentence you say first, the proof the pilot shows by week 2, and a line that asks if it is resolved. Patrick Forquer, CRO at Legora, calls his version 8 Mile: disarm a competitive objection by naming the competitor’s move first. The GTMnow write-up gives the principle, not the mechanics. Armand Farrokh adds the posture: agree the buyer made a real choice before you handle it.

My take: I would not rewrite the pitch first. I would count what the buyer parked. I would treat a parked objection as a risk before a spoken one, and resolved needs the buyer’s words, not my read of the room. Log an objection only when the buyer confirms it in a sentence.

The rule: you cannot raise a rate you never counted. Count the deferred objections before you touch the pitch.

Sources: GTMnow (Sophie Buonassisi with Patrick Forquer), “How Legora Went From $3.5M to $200M+ ARR in Just 2 Years” (6 October 2026) · 30 Minutes to President’s Club (Armand Farrokh), “We Already Have A Vendor for that Objection” (September 2025)

The play: 5 steps to design a pilot the buyer keeps and say the objection first. 20 deals, 5 objections, 1 pilot brief, 1 decision date.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Problem 1: your next video has no job to do

From my week: in a post in March 2025 I wrote that the best founders would teach rather than sell. A post that teaches still needs one door behind it. For a video, that door is the job you name first.

In B2B, 1 view can equal 1 customer, writes Pierre Herubel in his 9 October edition on YouTube. So the first decision is the job, not the topic. He names 3 jobs: build a funnel, reinforce your authority, or sell directly with a link to buy or book. Do not sell directly in every video.

Then the order of work. Most teams write long, then chop it short. Herubel does the reverse: he tests an idea on LinkedIn, and when it performs, he extends it into a long video and a newsletter. One idea validated this way became a video with 61,000 views, thousands of email subscribers and a USD 100K product. He sells his own course. Read the 61,000 as proof of the order, not as your target.

The rest is craft. Write the title and thumbnail before the script. Give 5% of the topic in the video and 95% in a guide made for it. Put the main call to action at 20 to 30% of the video, because people leave.

The Founder-Led Marketing Show adds scale. Owner.com, far above your size, compared 2 videos with the same title and thumbnail: 100,000 views against 3,400. Its process runs brand strategy into topics into script flow, and its CEO spent 10 hours every Saturday producing videos. Take the process. Leave the budget.

My take: I do not need every tactic. Herubel lists many, and I take 3: the job, the order and the guide. Everything else is polish. A video with no job is content. A video with a job is a pipeline asset. I would count booked calls, not views, and cut a video I love if I cannot say what it is for.

The European read: your video crosses borders for free. Your guide does not. Write it in the buyer’s language for your first 2 markets, and keep the form to 1 question.

The rule: 1 objective per video, chosen before you record, with 1 door behind it.

You know it worked when: every video you publish has its job written next to it, and booked calls from video is a number you report. Founder read: your last 5 videos each have a job in 1 line.

The play: 5 steps to turn your content into booked calls with one front-end offer.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Pierre’s Content Guides (Pierre Herubel), “How to get leads from YouTube in B2B” (9 October 2026) · The Founder-Led Marketing Show (Finn Thormeier with David Fallarme), “Owner.com’s Youtube & Founder Brand Playbook” (6 October 2026) · Koen Stam, LinkedIn, “The best founders in 2025 won’t sell. They’ll teach.” (15 March 2025)

Problem 2: your pilot leaves the buyer nothing to defend

From my week: on 16 September I posted that I relaunched an internal agent pilot with the same technology and a different job description, and that the reception inside the team flipped. I had no results to report yet.

Most pilots end when the license ends. The buyer has no work to show internally and every reason to wait. Nobody says no. They say let us regroup.

Patrick Forquer describes the opposite at Legora, where revenue went from USD 3.5M to over USD 100M in about a year, then doubled in under 6 months. The pilot gives the customer the IP, the integrations and the workflow docs to keep, converted or not. Almost nobody buys without trying first, so the worst case is a customer who learned the category on your time.

Scale that down. Legora sells a new category into law firms at a size far above yours, so leave its hiring ratio of 2 post-sale people per pre-sale person. Take the shape: start with simple use cases that drive fast ROI, then move into complex workflows.

Check the counter-case. Ron Johnson, who built the first Apple Store, turned down a scaled-down test because it would have proved nothing and buried the idea. If your product only shows its value at full scale, a pilot can kill the deal. Then say so in the pitch.

My take: a pilot sells like a job description. In September I changed the job of an internal pilot, not the technology, and the reception flipped. For a pilot I would design, I would first write what the buyer keeps before kickoff, set 3 criteria I am confident to hit, box it at 3 weeks and put the decision date in both calendars on day 1. Keep means the work product built in the pilot. Product code and license stay with the seller. A no-decision is the worst outcome, so a date decides. If they walk, they still get the keep pack.

The European read: in a European enterprise deal the keep pack passes through procurement and data protection. Agree the data terms for the pilot before kickoff, or week 1 goes to paperwork.

The rule: a pilot ends in a decision or a named blocker, and the buyer holds the work either way.

You know it worked when: pilots end on the planned date with a yes, a no or a named blocker, and objection resolution rate is a number you report each month. Founder read: your next pilot has a decision date in both calendars.

The play: 5 steps to design a pilot the buyer keeps and say the objection first.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: GTMnow (Sophie Buonassisi with Patrick Forquer), “How Legora Went From $3.5M to $200M+ ARR in Just 2 Years” (6 October 2026) · Make It Happen (John Barrows with Ron Johnson), “How Steve Jobs Built the Apple Store” (21 September 2026) · Koen Stam, LinkedIn, “Earlier this month I relaunched a pilot that half of my feed says is dead” (16 September 2026)

Problem 3: your Q4 outbound plan counts days your team does not have

From my week: I am off this week, 5 weekdays out of my own Q4. My last day before leaving was a run of 1:1s to keep things in motion. My rule: leave goes on the capacity sheet first, mine included.

Q4 has 66 weekdays on paper: 22 in October, 21 in November, 23 in December. Your outbound team does not have 66 days to prospect. Elric Legloire at Outbound Kitchen starts by removing 21 to 31 December, which is 9 weekdays. His baseline is 57 selling days, before leave, local holidays and internal days. From today, 48 remain until Friday 18 December.

Then the plan becomes capacity. Say 5 fully ramped SDRs each deliver 12 attended demos a month: 180 for Q4. Show rate is the share of booked meetings that happen. At 70%, 180 demos need about 257 bookings. At 60%, they need 300. Run the sum on your own Q3 number.

Now the rep gap, in his example. Rep A booked 22 meetings, a 0.79% call-to-meeting rate. Rep C booked 8 at 0.44%. At Rep C’s call volume, matching 0.79% gives about 14 meetings, 6 more. That is a near-2X lever for 1 rep, not 14 extra meetings. And it is not a verdict. Legloire checks in order: effort, knowledge, skills, whether your coaching transfers, then the system around the rep.

Last, give every monthly target 2 dates: booked by and held by. Otherwise November bookings hide an empty December calendar. Review every Friday and write 1 change for next week.

He admits: last October was his team’s biggest pipeline month ever, and he does not credit the planner alone.

My take: a rep gap is a question, not a verdict, and my own coaching is the first thing I check. Count the selling days on your own Q4 calendar this week, starting with your own leave.

The European read: count public holidays per country, not per team. 11 November is a Wednesday this year and a holiday in Belgium and France. 8 December is a Tuesday and a holiday in Austria, Italy and Spain. A rep in each country is a day short.

The rule: no activity target goes up until the days, the bottleneck and the accounts are written down.

You know it worked when: team selling days remaining is a number everyone can quote, and each month shows a book-by and a held-by count. Founder read: you can say how many selling days you personally have left to 18 December.

The play: 5 steps to turn your outbound Q4 plan into a capacity plan.

Join this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Outbound Kitchen (Elric Legloire), “Your 5-step system for outbound Q4” (8 October 2026)

Also on the radar

3 plays that sit next to the 3 moves, rather than adding a fourth.

• The video needs a budget line. Split demand spend between brand and capture.
  5 steps to split demand budget between brand and capture, and cut the middle

• The quiet number in your capacity plan: the share of booked meetings that happen.
  5 steps to increase your outbound meeting-booked and held rate

• The step before the pilot. A demo that earns the next step.
  5 steps to run a demo that advances the deal

Steal this move: cut the dead deals your forecast still counts in 4 weeks

Your pilot dates and capacity plan feed the commit. This play cleans what it already counts.

Fixes: a commit that counts deals which stopped moving months ago and still read green.

Best for: 5-20M ARR teams that commit a number every week. Founders run it on their live deals.

Template: one row per open deal: segment, age in days, past the death line (Y or N), in the commit (Y or N), keep or strip. Totals: padded number, stripped number, gap.

Paste this into your AI:

Here is my closed-won export and my open pipeline: [paste]. Set my death line at twice the median days-to-close of won deals, strip every open deal past it, and re-forecast the survivors weighted by stage age times velocity. Show me the gap between my padded number and my honest one.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Why this matters now

Today is 14 October. Q4 has 48 weekdays left before 21 December, before leave. If your cycle from first touch to held demo is 10 selling days, the last first touch that can still make a Q4 demo lands on Friday 4 December, 7 weeks from now.

After that date, every first touch is Q1 pipeline. Plan it as Q1, in writing, before Friday 16 October.

3 questions for the room

• What is the 1 job of each of your last 5 videos, and who wrote it down?

• What did the buyer keep from your last pilot, and which objection did they carry out unsaid?

• How many selling days does your outbound team have left to 18 December, and what is your last first-touch date?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5.5; edited & approved by Koen

4 years of data, 3 levers, 1 line back from finance

Mid-October is when finance sends the first draft of next year’s plan back. The second version is the one that gets signed.

My week had 1 word: stretch. 2 days defending next year’s plan, a late flight home, a customer the next morning, then a wall of 1:1s. The second version of a plan needs fewer seats, more trust and more owners.

Lesson 1: finance answered my plan with 1 line about headcount

It was not a presentation. It was 2 days of conversations with senior people across departments, ending at a lunch with our finance director. I worked on the plan every spare hour in between. If you lead, you defend your flank: you learn what other departments need and form pacts before you ask.

I opened with the last 4 years in my org: lower cost of acquisition, better net revenue retention, ARR growth every year. Then 3 scenarios, realistic, stretch and aggressive, each with its NRR, CAC payback and pipeline needed. Then 3 levers. Brand and demand. Partnerships. Productivity across BDRs, AEs, AMs and CSMs, with AI and a dedicated engineer.

Then a plan per market and an investment list, with where the plan breaks without each item.

The reply, in short: a fair point, but go back to the drawing board and make it even more efficient. Scale with less net added headcount, and lean more on automation, process and AI.

My take: I should have asked myself that question first. A plan that adds a seat for every gap is not defended. It is a request. CJ Gustafson gives the finance view: AI spend does not get grandfathered in. It competes from zero against every other dollar, whether that dollar goes to a head, a tool or a token budget. My next version prices every new seat against the cheaper ways to get the same output. I will fight for the seats that survive.

The European read: across several markets, the reflex is 1 more seat per country. Split what must be local, the voice on the call and the person in the room, from what can be shared: research, prep and reporting.

The rule: every new seat names the output it produces and the cheaper way you rejected.

You know it worked when: every new seat in version 2 has its output and 1 rejected cheaper option written next to it. Founder read: you can say in 1 sentence why your next hire beats a tool or a process fix.

The play: 5 steps to add output without adding headcount. It starts with the share of your won base that nobody touched last quarter. You point the team at that revenue and give each person 1 owned outcome, all before you open a seat.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: CJ Gustafson, Mostly Metrics, “A Guide to Budgeting for Token Costs this Annual Planning Season” (29 September 2026)

Lesson 2: the directors asked whether we still fit in 3 years

Thursday morning, after a late flight home, 3 of us drove 1 to 2 hours south for a customer onsite. We met the directors of a family-owned group with entities across Europe. It could be one of the bigger first deals on our board this year.

They want to bring one core system together across every country. Their real question was not the demo. Can we lean on you today, and in the years to come?

They also look at the leadership, the philosophy and how we are financed.

1 director asked: what is the main difference between the local competitors and you?

I said: “We act local. We have an office here, that is why 3 of us are here with you. But we are European. We help European-headquartered companies with international ambitions, like yours. The local players focus mainly on this one country.”

1 more thing helped. I explained how consciously we decide where our money goes, down to sponsorships. It built credibility with those executives.

My take: an onsite costs almost a full day for several people, and it is worth it. Executives buying for several countries buy trust and long-term fit. A feature list answers neither. Have the local-competitor answer ready before you walk in, and make it true. I could defend it without being salesy, because it is what we stand for.

The European read: I did not walk in alone, and that was half the answer. A group with entities across Europe needs a partner who is local in every room and European in the plan. Say both, in that order.

The rule: in a multi-country deal, answer the fit-in-3-years question before the feature question.

You know it worked when: each of your top deals has an in-person executive meeting on record, and every seller gives the same local-versus-European answer. Founder read: you can give the answer without notes.

The play: 5 steps to run team selling that multi-threads every deal. 3 people in that room only count if each owns a thread: the director, the operational lead and the person who signs.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 3: I built too much of the plan myself, and my leaders paid in time pressure

Looking back, I did run the plan across functions. I built bottom-ups with marketing, field marketing, country leaders and my second-line lead for account management and customer success.

Still, I did too much myself. And I tend to start this prep too late, or share it too late. That puts time pressure on my people to deliver their part.

When I put myself in their shoes, a lot of the plan comes from them. If they are part of the bottom-up from day 1, they build buy-in for the plan along the way.

The same pattern shows up in my 1:1s. Next steps are not always written down, so we forget who owns what. I keep AI out of my 1:1s, because they are private. So the mechanism has to be human: the report writes the next steps and owns them.

The 1:1 I got right this week was a growth conversation with a former AE who now runs a proposition across our markets. I had promised him the time, so I prepared the night before, at the end of a stretched week. We covered what he did well over 3 months, where he can grow, and what the next step needs. We documented all of it.

My take: ownership I keep is buy-in I lose. Toni Hohlbein and Mikkel Svane name where that road ends: the CFO writes the plan, the CRO carries it, and the CRO gets fired when it misses. My fix for the next round of planning, in the coming weeks: set the guidelines with RevOps first. Then hand each leader their key topics early enough to think, prep and present their part. We iterate on their version, not mine.

The European read: a country leader sees what head office cannot. Give them their topic before the numbers, so their market is built into the plan, not added later.

The rule: hand out the topics before you write the plan, and let the report write the next steps.

You know it worked when: each leader presents a part of the plan they built, and every 1:1 doc has next steps in the report’s words. Founder read: your plan has at least 1 section you did not write.

The play: 5 steps to reset the quarter with your leaders and 3 owned initiatives. 1 initiative, 1 named owner, no shared ownership, and a weekly check that it moved.

Sources: Toni Hohlbein and Mikkel Svane, The Revenue Formula, “The plan that kills most teams: Annual planning for b2b SaaS” (6 August 2024)

This week’s play to steal

Fewer net new heads means every remaining hire counts double. I keep the last 30 minutes of every final interview for motivation, the skills they lack, and what they built with AI lately. In BDR interviews lately, AI use rarely goes past research and prep. Maybe our bar is high. We still need that productivity from every person. Ruben Dominguez reports that ElevenLabs now hires on what candidates built unprompted, not years in a role.

Fixes: interviews that reward a polished story over proof of work.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams adding fewer seats next year, where every hire has to lift the average. Across markets, run the same case in every country, in the local language.

Template: 1 scorecard per finalist. Score 1 to 5 on reasoning under pressure, quality of the work, GTM judgment, communication, and AI fluency (built, not just used). Close with 1 line: lifts the team average, yes or no.

Paste this into your AI:

Here is the role I am hiring for and the 1 outcome it must produce in its first month: [paste]. Here are my 2 or 3 best performers in similar roles and what makes them strong: [paste]. Draft a paid week-one proof task with a definition of done, a 1-hour case built on a real problem from my pipeline, and a scorecard with 5 dimensions scored 1 to 5, including AI fluency. Describe a bar-raiser answer for each. End with 2 off-script questions I should ask live.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Ruben Dominguez, The AI Corner, “Everyone Is Hiring for Judgment. Nobody Is Making It Anymore.” (21 September 2026)

Why this matters now

The October default is a shorter list of the same seats.

Run it the other way. Price every seat against its output. Earn trust in the customer’s room. Hand the plan to the people who carry it.

3 questions for the room

• Which seat in next year’s plan would you still defend if finance asked for the cheaper way?

• In your biggest multi-country deal, what is your answer to the local competitor, and has an executive heard it in person?

• Which section of next year’s plan did someone other than you build?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5.5; edited & approved by Koen

3 versions of the plan, 2 years of lean, 1 conversation before the flight home

In the next 4 weeks, most leadership teams settle who runs what on 1 January. The people you test now lead in Q1.

My week ran on 2 clocks. The first 3 days were a milestone onsite. The back half was next year’s plan, built in fragments. 3 moments taught me what reacceleration needs: a person, a plan and a pace.

Lesson 1: the conversation before the flight home tested the role, not the money

We opened a team lead role to scale one of our go-to-market teams. One of my leaders came back with an idea. One of his AEs could step up.

He and I each held a separate conversation with the AE. The question was real appetite for the role.

Mine was on day 3 of our international onsite, just before everyone flew home. I told him why not every AE makes a good sales leader. I do not think a financial step up is a valid reason to take the job. Then I gave him my test. Can you cheer for others and put your ego aside?

Later that week, the application came in.

I got the same advice. Before the summer of 2025 I was presenting for the role I hold now, and I did not know if I wanted it. My future manager said: just give it a go, present your plan, and you will find out along the way how much it excites you.

My take: readiness for a lead role is not a title conversation. It is a test of appetite and ego, run by 2 people separately. Presenting the plan is part of the test, because that is where you learn whether the problem gives you energy. I would rather someone find out in a plan meeting than after the announcement. A team of tomorrow is also not only external hires. Every week my talent acquisition lead updates me on the open international roles, and the bar goes up on every external hire. The same bar applies to the person already in the building.

The European read: across borders, a step-up often comes with a relocation question. Keep the 2 apart. Ask what they want from the role first. Ask what they would move for second.

The rule: test the appetite for the role, not the raise, with 2 people asking separately. The test is whether they can cheer for others and put their ego aside.

You know it worked when: every internal step-up has a written plan on file before the decision, and your internal fill rate for lead seats is a number you track. Founder read: you can say why your next lead is the person you picked.

The play: 5 steps to keep your best closer without making them a manager. Elena Verna makes the case that senior people can stay individual contributors at senior pay and scope. This play writes that seat down, so the growth conversation has 2 respected paths and not 1 default.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Elena Verna, “IC work is the new career flex” (14 May 2026)

Lesson 2: our pre-mortem listed the constraints before we picked the number

I presented the high-level plan for next year to my leaders. Then we asked a different question. Imagine we are a year ahead and looking back. We had no plan. What went wrong?

The room listed the constraints. Retention and attrition. Staffing capacity and the ramp of new people. The handover between new business implementation, customer success and account management. New business growth that leans on 2 regions. And the one nobody likes: what is plan B if the pipeline does not deliver?

The method is Gary Klein’s premortem: assume the project failed, then write down why.

My RevOps partner and I built the plan by region from the last 6 to 7 quarters, with trend lines on win rate, pipeline, average revenue per account, discount levels, MRR, churn, NRR and expansion. I also built bottom-up plans with my marketing leaders, a realistic and an aggressive one, to see what extra budget the aggressive plan needs.

We now have 3 versions: realistic, stretch and aggressive. My leaders are, more or less, with the realistic one. I still have to bring them to the stretch one. It is a net new number we have not added in the 7 years we have operated in this market.

1 more line went into the plan. A dinner with a CCO on Wednesday night put the same gap in front of me again: no weekly room where AEs, marketing and leadership go through named key accounts, stakeholder by stakeholder.

My take: a pre-mortem lets a room argue with a plan before the plan has an owner. It surfaces the constraints that upside thinking hides, so the number comes after them. Trust is not belief. My leaders trust the realistic number because they helped build it. Belief in the stretch number has to be earned the same way. I will put the constraint list next to it and ask which ones we can move. I want it to feel like our plan, not only mine.

The European read: across several markets, 1 plan is several trend lines. When 2 regions carry most of the new business growth, a miss in 1 market is a miss in the plan.

The rule: constraints before the number. The realistic number is what your leaders trust. The stretch number is what the constraint list has to earn.

You know it worked when: every version of the number has its constraint list beside it, and each leader can say which constraint they own. Founder read: both versions of your number name their biggest risk.

The play: 5 steps to split next year’s plan into core and bets to hit the growth target. The core carries what you can forecast. The bets cover the gap to the stretch, with their own budget.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Gary Klein, Harvard Business Review, “Performing a Project Premortem” (September 2007)

Lesson 3: 2 years of lean bought trust, and trust gets spent in stages

In a Q&A this week with the people who sign off our investment, I said what the last 2 years were for. We ran lean, efficient and productive. NRR under control. Cost of acquisition under control. Win rate solid. We hit Q3 on new and existing business, and the onsite celebrated a milestone.

The milestone is not the finish line. It is the signal to reinvest and push harder in international. That sign-off was built on trust. Sometimes you reset and rebuild strong foundations before you can reaccelerate.

I spend trust the same way I earned it. Our AI co-pilot for BDRs and AEs started a few months ago with a small group of BDRs in 2 markets. We read the first results, then extended it to 1 AE in a third market. This week it goes to more BDRs and to the rest of the AEs in the first 2 markets. The third follows. It is not a full rollout yet: pilot, initial impact, wider impact.

Full integration is rare. Default’s H1 2026 survey found only 25% of teams integrating AI across all go-to-market functions. It is vendor-run, so I read it as direction.

My take: reacceleration is not a switch. 2 years of unit economics bought me the right to spend, not the right to spend everything at once. I treat trust like capital. My rule: release it in tranches, and open the next stage only when the last one shows impact.

The European read: international means another language, another buyer and another legal basis for outreach in every country. A staged rollout lets 1 country team prove it before the next one copies it.

The rule: spend trust in stages. Each stage earns the next.

You know it worked when: every investment has stage gates with a metric and a date, and no tranche is released before its gate review. Founder read: you can name the 1 number that decides your next tool or hire.

The play: 5 steps to embed AI into one revenue motion end to end. 1 motion first, shared prompts, a named owner, then the next motion.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Default, “The State of AI in Revenue Operations: H1 2026” (11 June 2026)

This week’s play to steal

All 3 lessons spend the same asset: capacity you already paid for. A step-up, a plan and a rollout all fail when nobody wrote down what the seat is for. The smallest version: 1 number per seat, read after 1 cycle.

Fixes: a hire or promotion that burns capacity you already bought, because nobody named the seat’s job.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams filling seats internally or externally.

Template: 1 page per seat: the number, the leading indicator, the 3-stage plan with checks and this month’s skill.

Paste this into your AI:

Here is the role and comp plan for a seat I am filling: [paste]. Draft the 1 number the seat exists to move and its leading indicator. Define a healthy mid-cycle mark from our last 4 quarters: [paste]. Build a 3-stage plan, buyer, product, then sales, each with a check. List 20 calls to shadow.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Why this matters now

The default is to announce a promotion and a plan on the same day.

Run it in order. Test the appetite. List the constraints before the number. Spend trust in stages.

3 questions for the room

• Who on your team could lead next year, and has anyone asked them about the role, not the raise?

• If next year’s plan had failed by December, which 3 reasons would your leaders write, and which one has no plan B?

• Which of next year’s investments has a stage gate with a metric and a date?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen

This week’s number 1 move

Run 1 weekly customer review on 1 set of records before you automate any part of retention.

Wednesday’s number 1 move ran this spine on the acquisition side. Brendan Short’s case on XBOW is usually told as a sales story: 12 tools cut to 5 and the data model fixed before any agent was built. The same case has a retention half. XBOW’s internal tool includes a Friday customer review of about 90 minutes, and that review feeds expansion.

Sangram Vajre shows the other road. In 1 of his cases, ticket resolution time dropped 40% and net revenue retention fell anyway. Faster answers did not keep the customer.

SaaStr’s own agent build points the same way. Its renewal agent prepares a deck per customer and routes it to the right person. My read: the agent prepares the conversation, a person still has it.

My take: after the signature is where the money compounds, and it is where I review before I automate. I would rather have 1 human review a week, on 1 set of numbers everyone trusts, than 5 retention agents each reading their own copy of the account. CS sits in that room, or it is not a customer review. So my order is fixed. First the review, with CS, sales and whoever owns the bill in it. Then 1 record per account that all 3 agree on. Only then an agent that prepares the review, never 1 that replaces it.

The rule: review, then agree the record, then automate. A faster answer on a record nobody trusts is still a churn.

The play: 5 steps to architect your AI rollout instead of cleaning up after it. 1 reference build, 1 owner and a measured handoff, set before anything launches.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: The Signal (Brendan Short), “XBOW” (22 September 2026) · Run on GTM OS (Sangram Vajre), “AI isn’t breaking marketing or sales or CS. The real answer will annoy you” (23 September 2026) · The Official SaaStr Podcast (Jason Lemkin, Amelia Lerutte), “We Doubled Revenue with Agents. Here’s Exactly How” (18 September 2026)

Problem 1: your onboarding slips on dates the client never agreed to

From my week: one story at our customer wall last week: a new account team had built momentum with a steady customer, then a third-party integration escalated and the account became a churn risk. The team brought it back.

An integration someone else owns is the dependency that belongs on the kickoff slide.

Your delivery team has owners, dates and a plan. The client side has an admin with a day job and no stated commitment. So the project waits on a file, an access request or a security review, and nobody logged the day it was asked for.

Hakan Ozturk framed this as a missing system, not a chasing problem. His line on AI is the honest one: it cannot make their admin send the file, but it can own the record and fire the reminder.

The fix is written. Pull your last 5 onboardings and log every point where your team waited on the client, in working days. Cut the list to the 5 that cost the most. At the next kickoff, put those 5 on 1 slide with a response window and a named client owner each, and say the reset rule out loud: if a dependency is N days late, go-live moves by N.

On Make It Happen, Elizabeth Salmoun treats the timing of the handoff from AE to CSM as a retention lever, not an admin step. The promises made in the sale belong on that same list.

My take: every implementation problem I have seen is the sales problem 1 step later. Something important was agreed in a conversation and never written into a system. It holds while 1 person carries it and breaks when the account count goes up. A response window is not bureaucracy at any size. It is the cheapest thing you will build this quarter: no hire, no tool, just the dates said out loud while everyone is still happy.

The European read: security review and data processing sign-off are real gates in many of your buyers’ companies, with their own queues. Give them a window of their own and name the person, not the department.

The rule: state the response window before anything is late. Said at kickoff it is a plan. Said in week 6 it is an accusation.

You know it worked when: client-caused delay days are logged per account and read at the renewal review, and renewal win rate separates on accounts with a clean onboarding. Founder read: your last 3 kickoffs each ended with 5 named client owners.

The play: 5 steps to stop onboarding slipping on what the client owes you.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: The CS Cafe (Hakan Ozturk), “The SLA that ends client-caused delays” (9 August 2026) · Make It Happen (John Barrows) with Elizabeth Salmoun, “How Customer Success Drives Retention, Revenue & Growth” (7 September 2026)

Problem 2: your referral button is waiting for customers who will never click it

From my week: one customer at our wall last week has grown 19x in 5 years, module by module. It is now a reference for 2 other companies.

Your happiest customers would introduce you. Almost nobody asks them at the right moment. Then a team swings the other way and builds a referral program the product has not earned.

Maja Voje, with Stefan Bader and Elena Verna, sets the test before the build. 3 conditions: high lifetime value, fast time to value, high engagement. 2 of the 3 usually suffice.

Outside them sits what they call the death valley: under about 500 monthly active users, an ACV too low to fund a reward, or a cycle so long the referrer waits months. The answer there is not yet. Fix the product first.

For a sales-led team the reframe is simple. The program is a customer success ask, made at NPS 9 or 10 and at milestones, naming 2 or 3 specific people. The GTMnow team adds why it pays: warm introductions get roughly 3 times the response of cold outreach.

The referred customer is worth more once signed. A Wharton study found referred customers churned 18% less and were worth about 16% more. That was a German bank in 2011, so read it as direction.

My take: I have watched founders copy a referral button into a sales-led product with 40 customers and wait for nothing. If you sell at a real ACV on a long cycle, your referral program is a person, not a button. Give CS the ask at NPS 9 and at every milestone, name the targets, and write the intro blurb for the customer. My one rule: never let goodwill sit uncounted. Tag the source, or the motion never earns its budget.

The European read: your customers’ networks are local and often not in English. Name targets inside the referrer’s own market and language, and match any thank-you to their company’s gift policy, which is stricter in many of our markets.

The rule: test fit before you build, and ask at the moment of delight. A vague “know anyone” is not an ask.

You know it worked when: advocacy participation, the share of asked customers who sent at least 1 intro, is a number you report. Founder read: referral shows up as its own source in your last 20 opportunities.

The play: 5 steps to run a referral sprint that turns customers into pipeline.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: GTM Strategist (Maja Voje) with Stefan Bader and Elena Verna, “How to Build a B2B User Referral Program (and How to Know You’re Not Ready)” (25 September 2026) · GTMnow (Sophie Buonassisi), “Inside LinkedIn: buyer behavior, how to social sell, and why warm intros get 3x the response” (23 September 2026) · Schmitt, Skiera and Van den Bulte, “Referral Programs and Customer Value”, Journal of Marketing (2011)

Problem 3: your usage bill is losing the renewal before the renewal call

From my week: one customer at our wall grows by acquisition. It adds seats in blocks of a few hundred, and the next block is already planned for early next year. That is what predictable looks like from the customer’s side.

Your usage model works on the way in. Then a busy quarter lands a bill 40% above plan. Your champion has to explain a budget miss to a CFO who never approved it. At renewal, that CFO asks for a cap, a discount or a smaller commit.

Rob Litterst, sharing Teneo’s research, calls buyer pushback on unpredictable pricing the most important stat in the deck. 47% of vendors say buyers turn AI features down for unpredictable pricing. 39% say it is the price.

The market moved anyway. Hybrid fixed-plus-usage pricing now sits at 66% of vendors, up from 45% in 2023. The fix he describes is structure, not discount: commit tiers in T-shirt sizes with usage included, a brake for finance, and a wallet, the prepaid balance the customer can see.

Stripe’s CRO for AI companies makes the same call on SaaStr: get hybrid seat-plus-usage pricing right early, because it drives retention.

My take: with usage pricing, the renewal is often lost in the invoice long before the renewal call. So I start with 1 question: can the buyer put us in next year’s budget as 1 fixed number. The mistake I see most is treating the bill as a finance output. It is a customer experience. If CS is not in the room when you review the wallet, you are running a billing review, not a revenue review. AI can scan the burn, meaning monthly usage per account, and size the tiers in minutes. How much risk I ask a customer to carry stays my call.

The European read: most of your buyers budget once a year and procurement reads every variable line. Price tiers in euros, and send the renewal offer inside the buyer’s budget month, not in the last month of the term.

The rule: no customer should learn about a budget miss from your invoice. Sell predictability before you sell volume.

You know it worked when: net revenue retention rises while renewals with a discount fall, and spike accounts shrink to a named list. Founder read: your top 10 accounts each know their balance before the invoice lands.

The play: 5 steps to make usage bills predictable so renewals and expansions close.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: PricingSaaS (Rob Litterst) with Teneo, “14 Trends in AI Monetization” (25 September 2026) · The Official SaaStr Podcast (Jason Lemkin), “175% Growth, 120 Countries, Agents as Buyers: Stripe’s CRO of AI on The New AI GTM Playbook” (23 September 2026)

Also on the radar

2 plays that make the 3 moves land, rather than adding a fourth.

The up-tier from burn. Once the bill is predictable, usage becomes the expansion signal. This builds the motion off it.

Access it here

The room referrals come from. If the fit test says not yet, a customer community is where goodwill builds while the product catches up.

Access it here

Steal this move: make the renewal bill 1 fixed number in 4 weeks

Fixes: a usage or credit bill that surprises the buyer’s CFO, so renewals stall and expansions die in procurement.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams on usage, credit or hybrid pricing, selling into buyers who budget once a year across 1 or more markets.

Template: one row per account. Columns: average monthly bill, highest month, spike months, usage cut after a spike, recommended tier, annual commit, budget month, forecast exhaustion date, owner.

Paste this into your AI:

Here are 12 months of invoice totals and usage per account: [paste]. Flag every month 20% or more above each account’s average, and every account that cut usage after a spike. Then propose 3 commit tiers with usage included, sized on real burn, and tell me which tier each account lands in. Flag any account where a commit would run above what it actually uses.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Why this matters now

Your customers’ finance teams are drafting their 2027 budgets this month. What they write down for you is decided by what they can predict now.

A slipped go-live, a referral ask at the wrong moment and a surprise invoice all land in the same budget meeting.

The 3 problems are 1 argument at 3 stages. Dates the client agreed to. An ask made at the moment of delight. A bill finance can write as 1 line.

3 questions for the room

• Which client dependency slipped most in your last 5 onboardings, and who on their side owned it?

• Does your product pass 2 of the 3 referral conditions, or are you building in the death valley?

• Which of your top 20 accounts had a month 20% over its average this year, and did anyone call them?

Join The Revenue Room

• 8 people, 1 quarter. European B2B SaaS founders between 1M and 10M ARR and GTM leaders who own the number. I tell you what I would do in your seat, you run it. No course, no content library, nothing to fall behind on.

• A hotline. A private group nobody outside it sees. Post the problem that is on your desk, any working day, and you have my answer within 48 hours, plus whatever the other 7 have run into before. You never solve a complex one alone again.

• A 90-minute call every 2 weeks, case-led. You post your case 48 hours ahead, 3 cases get the floor, and I tell you what I would do, stop doing and measure by Friday. Next call you come back with what happened and we keep solving problems together.

• 1 private 60-minute session with me, placed where it moves your number most.

I have scaled B2B SaaS to 10M ARR 3 times now and I run a GTM org pushing toward 40M ARR, in Europe. You get what I am running this quarter, not what I remember from 2019.

Join The Revenue Room. 12 weeks sprint.

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen

This week’s number 1 move

Fix the base before you add another agent. Cut the stack, agree one data model, then automate.

The first thing many teams switch on in a new quarter is another agent, often on a stack nobody has cut.

Brendan Short’s case on XBOW runs the other way. The first 6 months went into the stack and the data model. The sales stack went from 12 tools to 5 before a single agent was built. Then 1 internal tool ran the whole customer journey, from first touch to renewal, and a team of 3 people built the first version.

Sangram Vajre names what happens when you skip that. AI does not break your go-to-market, it exposes the debt you already had. 10 times more content with flat pipeline. More meetings and a falling close rate, because the AI booked outside the ideal customer profile.

Zapier’s CMO put a number on the discipline: only about 24% of GTM workflows truly need AI. The rest want a fixed rule.

My take: AI amplifies, it does not fix. I have said it for years and I will keep saying it. Point an agent at a CRM that is half guesswork and the agent reads the guesswork as truth and acts on it faster. What I take from XBOW is not the funding. It is the order of work. Cut the tools first, because every tool you keep is a data model someone has to reconcile. Then agree what a stage, a lead source and a loss reason mean. Only then does an agent have something worth amplifying. My rule for 2026 is simple: earn the right to amplify before you deploy.

The rule: cut, then define, then automate. An agent on an uncut stack scales the disagreement between your tools.

Sources: The Signal (Brendan Short), “XBOW” (22 September 2026) · Run on GTM OS (Sangram Vajre), “AI isn’t breaking marketing or sales or CS. The real answer will annoy you” (23 September 2026) · The Founder-Led Marketing Show, “The future of the CMO role w/ Zapier’s CMO and Chief AI Transformation Officer” (22 September 2026)

The play: 5 steps to fix the base before you point an agent at it. A readiness check on the data and the process, run before any agent touches a motion.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Problem 1: your intent signals reach the buyer the same morning as everyone else’s

From my week: at our customer wall last week, one story started with an outbound call in 2021. We were not a fit for them yet. In 2025 they changed a tool next to ours, and our product had matured. In August they signed with us, after 3 demos and 3 onsites.

Your signal program runs on the same funding news, job posts and tech changes every competitor buys. The account hears from several vendors on the same morning.

Kyle Poyar calls it an arms race that turned his old standby signals into a commodity. The edge moved to the other half of the pair: your own records.

He names 4 pairings. A past champion plus a job change, then wait about a month before you call. A lost deal plus a change that matches the loss reason. A pricing-page visit plus a target-list account. Several users on personal-email signups at 1 company, rolled up to the account.

His benchmark explains why the second one matters. Only about 1 in 4 qualified opportunities becomes a customer. The other 3 already know you.

Heath Barnett adds the filter: fit, a trigger and the right person, scored so the rep sees why it fired.

My take: I fund signal plays the way I fund channels, on what they convert, never on what they produce. So no outside signal fires in my team unless it joins a record only we hold, and every pairing should get a kill date before it gets a sequence. A lost account does not come back because you sent more email. It comes back when something changes, and your own notes tell you what to say. A signal play that books meetings and closes nothing is the most expensive pipeline you own.

The European read: consent rules make bought contact data thinner here, and your market has fewer accounts to begin with. The records you already hold are worth more per account, because your list does not refill. Match loss reasons per country, because budget cycles differ.

The rule: no outside signal fires alone. Lead the touch with your own context and let the trigger set the timing.

You know it worked when: pipeline creation rate from paired plays beats your outbound baseline inside 1 quarter, on the same cost per opportunity. Founder read: 1 lost deal reopened this quarter on a trigger you matched on purpose.

The play: 5 steps to create pipeline by pairing your own data with outside buying signals. Builds the pairing map, 4 plays, a baseline and a kill date per play.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Growth Unhinged (Kyle Poyar), “The new battleground in GTM” (20 September 2026) · Outbound Squad (Jason Bay), “Building an AI-native sales motion with Heath Barnett” (7 September 2026)

Problem 2: your field event filled the room and sales never picked the names

From my week: September was wall-to-wall events for my teams: an award show, a live podcast in our office, an evening talk series. Last week I asked my regional marketing managers to sharpen the execution, because events are one of our 3 core sources of closed-won revenue and their impact is still hard to measure.

Marketing fills your events from the newsletter list. The follow-up waits for a clean attendee list.

Andrei Zinkevich and Lisa Schoberl show the opposite at Agicap, a French treasury software company selling to CFOs in the German-speaking market. Their cycle stretched from about 2 weeks to about 6 months. So they flipped who fills the room. Signups went from 80% via marketing email to 80% via sales and customer success.

Sales builds the list from its own pools: closed-lost on bad timing, stalled late-stage deals, old inbound. Reps invite by phone. After the event, every account lands in 1 of 4 tiers, each with its own next step.

Their failure case is the one to copy. Follow-ups ran 10 to 15 days late because the list waited on enrichment.

My take: on 24 September I wrote about who owns the pipeline in the room. The half I still missed was the invite list. So this is the split I am taking to my marketing managers: sales picks the names and owns the next step, marketing owns everything that makes the room worth the trip: the venue, the story, the briefing and the count. A room of 15 senior buyers in 1 city can be a real share of your segment in that country. That is too valuable to fill from a newsletter list.

The European read: a call from a rep the buyer knows still beats a polished email in most of our markets. Language matters too. Invite in the buyer’s language even if the room runs in English.

The rule: sales owns the names and the next step, marketing owns the room. Never let enrichment hold up a follow-up call.

You know it worked when: marketing influenced pipeline per event is counted once, split sped-up from created, and clears the bar you set before invites. Founder read: every attendee from your last dinner has an owner and a dated next step.

The play: 5 steps to turn field events into pipeline your sales team owns. The invite pools, the 4 follow-up tiers and the pipeline count sheet.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: Full-Funnel B2B (Andrei Zinkevich) with Lisa Schoberl, “Field marketing playbook” (25 September 2026) · FullFunnel.io, “How to run a global field marketing that generates pipeline” (11 September 2026)

Problem 3: your rep leaderboard is grading the lead source, not the rep

From my week: I closed the week with mid-year coaching conversations: progress, and constructive feedback.

In my 26 September edition I showed my channel conversion rates: marketing 38%, outbound 12%, partners 50%.

Your leaderboard ranks reps on bookings, so the rep with the partner leads looks best. Your activity report rewards the busiest.

Jordan Crawford followed every lead to the deal it became on a real team, and the story flipped. Same-day contact won at about 7%, the same as contact a week later. Days of contact in week 1 did the work. None won about 3%, 1 day about 5, 2 days about 11, 3 or more about 17.

The busiest rep sat second from the bottom on revenue per 100 leads. Partner leads returned about 1.5 times inbound.

His measure is deals won per 100 leads, inside 1 source. If a gap could be chance, call it a tie.

On Outbound Squad, a first-time sales manager adds the cadence: a monthly 1:1 on each rep’s numbers, kept separate from deal reviews.

My take: I stopped grading reps on a blended leaderboard when I saw my channels convert at 12, 38 and 50 percent. Put a partner-heavy rep next to an outbound-heavy rep and you are grading the lead, not the person. The rep who carries a third of our revenue and the rep who stalled after a segment move had the same manager and the same stack. The gap was craft. My rule: every rep gets 1 number to move and the name of a teammate who already hits it.

The European read: your lead sources differ by country, because partner density and inbound volume differ. Grade inside 1 source and 1 market, or you grade the country as well as the lead.

The rule: grade the rep inside 1 source, coach 1 tested habit, and call small gaps a tie.

You know it worked when: win rate by rep, measured inside 1 source, rises for the coached reps within a quarter. Founder read: each seller can name their 1 number and who to copy.

The play: 5 steps to grade your reps fairly within each lead source. The per-source scorecard, the habit test and 1 coaching number per rep.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Sources: On the Edge (Jordan Crawford), “Rep Review: a skill to grade every rep visually” (24 September 2026) · Outbound Squad (Jason Bay), “Lessons from a first-time sales manager” (14 September 2026)

Also on the radar

2 plays that make the 3 moves land, rather than adding a fourth.

The lost deals first. If the pairing map starts from closed-lost, this is the reactivation motion that runs underneath it.

Access it here

The days of contact. Crawford’s data says the second and third day win. This turns the follow-up loop into a team standard.

Access it here

Steal this move: grade every rep inside 1 source in 4 weeks

Fixes: a rep ranking that rewards lead mix and activity volume, so you coach the wrong reps on the wrong habit.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams with 3 to 10 sellers working mixed lead sources, in 1 or more markets.

Template: one row per rep, 1 source per table. Columns: leads, contacted 2+ days in week 1, meeting held in week 1, won, won per 100 leads, strongest step, coaching number, teammate to copy.

Paste this into your AI:

Here are my leads, activities and deals exports from last quarter: [paste]. Join them lead by lead, credit each lead to its first owner, and build a table of deals won per 100 leads per rep inside my largest lead source only. Label any gap you would expect from luck as a tie. Then test whether days of contact in week 1 changes win rate, and suggest 1 coaching number per rep.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Why this matters now

On Monday your first Q4 leaderboard goes up. Your team will chase whatever it ranks for the rest of the quarter.

You now hold 4 full quarters of leads, deals and losses. Start on 3 things before Monday: the loss reasons your signals should pair with, the pools your next event invites from, and the per-source table your reps are graded on.

Then point an agent at it.

3 questions for the room

• Which of your outside signals would still fire if it had to join a record only you hold?

• Who picked the names for your last event, and who called them the next day?

• If you split your leaderboard by lead source tomorrow, which rep moves most?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen

6 quarters of data, 3 working days, 1 month in a new seat, 1 question asked out loud

In the next 3 weeks, most leadership teams see next year’s plan in draft. Soon after, it meets the people who have to run it.

My week had 3 working days, after a family wedding. 3 conversations in it taught me what to do before a plan meets a room.

Lesson 1: my plan readout turned into a brainstorm

On Friday I walked into a session to read out next year’s plan for my part of the business.

I had prepared for a readout. I got a brainstorm.

The plan asks more of us than this year did. We do invest, but most of the growth has to come from the productivity of the team we have.

The questions were not about the target. Current state. Constraints. Mitigations. Opportunity.

Then the most senior leader in the room turned to our head of RevOps. What do you think? Where do you see constraints? Where do you see opportunity?

Questions like that were the markers. It stopped being only my plan.

The groundwork mattered. On Wednesday my RevOps partner and I built a simple bottoms-up model. Every country lead got the last 6 quarters of data by source and motion, and is building their own. On Thursday I went through every constraint, risk and dependency with my head of marketing.

My take: I will own this plan and I will be accountable for it. But on Friday it did not feel like carrying it alone. It really felt like our plan. What made that happen was not a better deck. It was a question asked out loud to someone other than me. A readout asks the room to approve. A brainstorm asks the room to find the break. A stretch plan needs the second, because the people who hit the constraints first are rarely the person presenting.

The European read: a plan across several markets is built from several local truths. The country lead who knows why 1 market converts slower can name that constraint. A model from the centre cannot. Give each country its own data and model before you add them up.

The rule: present the constraints before the target. A plan the room has questioned is a plan the room will own.

You know it worked when: your plan review spends more time on constraints than on the headline, and bottoms-up and top-down land within a gap you can explain. Founder read: 2 people other than you can name the plan’s biggest risk.

The play: 5 steps to build next quarter’s number bottoms-up. A per-seller capacity model, so the number your leads build starts from what they can actually do.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 2: my regional room does not cover the key account

On Wednesday I had dinner with a commercial leader I see as a mentor, a couple of steps ahead of where I want to be.

Those dinners start with life and family and end deep in go-to-market. For me they are priceless. This time I left with a room he built.

Every week, marketing, his AEs, their leaders, his VP and he sit together on their key accounts. Each AE answers the same questions. What did you do this week? Who are the stakeholders? How did they move? Marketing brings the campaigns it runs into those accounts. Claude keeps the digest short enough for the AEs to read.

I run a room too. Every other Friday my regional leaders walk through pipeline, implementation, renewals and the problems nobody wants to raise. It works for the region.

It does not cover the account. Nobody in it answers, account by account, which stakeholder moved this week.

That is exactly the piece missing in how we build mid-market and enterprise pipeline.

My take: a regional room makes problems visible. A key-account room makes people accountable. They are different jobs. 1 room cannot do both. On a mid-market deal the stakeholders move every week, and marketing is running campaigns into the same accounts. If those 2 things never meet in 1 room, they stay 2 motions pointed at 1 buyer. What I will steal first is the question, not the tool. Who moved, and what did you do about it.

The European read: in a smaller market your key account list is short and it does not refill. 1 stakeholder you lost track of is a real share of the segment. Across 2 or 3 countries the campaigns run in 2 or 3 languages, which is 1 more reason marketing and the AE need the same page.

The rule: the region gets a room every 2 weeks. The key account gets a room every week. Do not ask one to do the other’s job.

You know it worked when: known stakeholders per key account rise, and every key account shows at least 1 dated touch a week. Founder read: you can name who moved in each of your 10 accounts without opening the CRM.

The play: 5 steps to run a weekly sales meeting that decides, not reports. A pre-read carries the status, so the live half of the room only decides.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 3: a new leader’s first month is a readout you ask for

On Thursday I had lunch with a country leader who is 1 month into the seat.

He brought his first read: how he wants to structure his organization, where he sees potential, where he sees threats.

The first month is for reading the room. You need to understand what you are taking over before you change it.

Then comes the push, and it is the one I always got in my own career. What are the key things you really need to change or adjust? Do not wait too long. Just do it, because otherwise it drags.

My take: a new leader can fail in 2 directions. Change everything before they understand it, or understand everything and change nothing. The first month protects against the first. The question at the end of it protects against the second. A first-month readout forces a view while the eyes are still fresh. I push on the changes because that push is what I always got in my career. A first read that is never acted on slowly becomes the old organization’s read.

The European read: a new country leader inherits a market with its own buyers, partners and history. The first-month read is where you learn which parts of your standard system travel there, and which conversations need to be local.

The rule: give a new leader a month to read the room, then ask what they will change and by when. A first read that waits becomes the old organization’s opinion.

You know it worked when: your new leader has 2 dated changes in flight by day 45 and a go or no-go on each by day 60. Founder read: your newest hire changed 1 thing in their first 2 months that you would not have.

The play: 5 steps to know by day 60 whether your leadership hire is working. A 4-check test at day 60, so the go or no-go comes long before month 9.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

This week’s play to steal

All 3 lessons are the same move at 3 sizes: ask the question before you give the answer. The smallest version runs every week, in every 1:1 you hold.

Fixes: 1:1s that decay into a deal walk you could have read in the CRM.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams where 1 manager runs 4 to 10 direct reports, often across more than 1 market.

Template: 1 page per person, appended weekly. They bring: decision needed, blocked on, learned. You bring: decision you need, what you owe them. Then the metric against last week, and decisions out with owner and date. Score it 1 to 5 before each slot: 1 means only you wrote in it, 5 means both sides did and last week’s commitments are marked done or not.

Paste this into your AI:

Here are my direct report’s answers to 3 questions (decision needed, blocked, learned): [paste]. Here are their open deals: [paste]. Write a 5-line pre-read: what changed since last week, which answer has a deal behind it, and the 1 question I have not asked. Then list the decisions this 1:1 should end with.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Why this matters now

In the next 3 weeks, next year’s plan goes to your leadership in draft, then to your team. The default is a readout: the plan is finished, and the room is asked to believe it.

Run it the other way. Bring the constraints first and let the room find the break while it is cheap. Then give your key accounts a weekly room, and your newest leader a question with a date on it.

3 questions for the room

• Before you present next year’s plan, who other than you has told you where it breaks?

• Which of your key accounts had a stakeholder move last week that nobody in marketing heard about?

• What did your newest leader say they would change after their first month, and has it happened?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen

60+ operators in the room, 51 months to 24, 24 seats to 23, 10 BDRs to 4, 1 hand still up

Q3 closes on Wednesday.

This week, in a lot of companies, a quarter review will end with the same request. Pipeline is soft, so add 2 BDRs.

Last Wednesday I stood in front of 60+ founders and operators and showed them what we did instead, with every number on the screen.

Lesson 1: I told the good story and left out the pipeline

12 months ago I stood on the same stage and told the story of how we grew our Benelux business from 2M to 10M+ ARR in about 4 years.

It was a true story. It was also incomplete.

What I did not say: our pipeline was already stalling. Across 2025 it slid from 2.5M in Q1 to 1.9M in Q4. Pipeline is my number 1 problem for next year. It was my number 1 problem 3 years ago too.

So this year I opened with it. I asked the room to raise a hand if pipeline is their number 1 problem in 2026. Fewer hands than I expected.

Then the second question. Keep it up if you know where in your motion your pipeline actually breaks.

1 hand stayed up.

That second question is the whole lesson. A stalling pipeline is a symptom. The reflex is to pour volume into the top: more BDRs, more budget, more initiatives. Plays that worked in 2023 do not work in 2026, and AI is not going to fix 2027 on its own either.

My take: I no longer treat pipeline as a top-of-funnel problem. On a mid-market motion the next 2M comes from conversion across the whole journey: discovery to win, win to live, live to renewal and expansion. Every point of conversion I gain lowers the pressure on the top. I have not solved it. My Q4 is tight and I will say so. What changed is the first question I ask. Not where do I get more pipeline. Where does ours leak.

The European read: in a smaller market your addressable list is finite. A country with a few thousand accounts in your ICP does not refill because you hired 2 more BDRs. Conversion is the lever that works in all your markets at once.

The rule: before you add volume to the top, find the stage where your pipeline breaks. A leak does not close because you pour faster.

You know it worked when: the circled rate moves by week 4 and your top-of-funnel target can come down while the revenue target stays. Founder read: you can name your leaking stage in 1 sentence.

The play: 7 expert tactics to increase revenue by doing better. Works the stages after the opportunity opens, which is where the cheapest pipeline gain sits.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 2: I moved seats before I added any

In 2023 our team was built for the old SaaS days. 24 people. 1 in marketing. 10 BDRs. 8 AEs. 0 partner managers. 5 in account management and customer success. Around 70% of BDR and AE effort pointed at SMB.

Growth at all cost was the setting. It was a good year. It would not survive the next one.

I did not add headcount. I moved it.

First I pulled BDR seats into marketing: a marketing lead, a content creator and an event manager. Two years ago I did it again, this time into partnerships.

We also cut focus. SMB in the Netherlands first. Mid-market in the Netherlands next. Belgium and Luxembourg later. We said no out loud.

Today the team is 23 people. Marketing 3. BDRs 4. AEs 7. Partner managers 2. Account management and customer success 7. BDR effort on SMB is down to about 25%, AE effort to about 40%.

1 fewer seat. A different company underneath it.

My take: the fastest pipeline decision I made was not a hire. It was a transfer. Every BDR seat I moved cost meetings booked in the short term. What it bought were channels that convert at 38% and 50% instead of 12%. I am not telling you BDRs are finished. I still run 4, front-loaded with AI so they spend their hours calling. But when pipeline stalls now, my first question is which seat sits in the wrong place, not which seat is missing.

The European read: with notice periods of 1 to 3 months, a new seat is a 2-quarter bet before it produces anything. A moved seat is a 1-month bet. It is the fastest capacity lever you actually control.

The rule: move a seat before you add one. Your headcount mix is your pipeline mix, 2 quarters later.

24 seats became 23. The BDR row did the moving.

You know it worked when: pipeline per GTM head rises while headcount stays flat. Founder read: a channel you did not run a year ago shows up in your last 10 opportunities.

The play: 5 steps to add output without adding headcount. Gives you the audit for which seat to move and what to stop while you move it.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 3: the channel that did not exist converts best

As the seats moved, the channel mix moved with them.

In 2023, pipeline came 59% from marketing, 41% from outbound, 0% from partners. Now it is 56% marketing, 29% outbound, 15% partners. That is on latest lead source, which undercounts partners.

Then the conversion rate per channel. Marketing 38%. Outbound 12%. Partners 50%.

The channel that was zero 3 years ago converts about 4 times better than outbound.

That is why the revenue flipped. Revenue went from 66% SMB, 34% mid-market, 0% enterprise to 35%, 32% and 33%. Pipeline followed: SMB from 49% to 31%, enterprise from 20% to 39%.

Efficiency moved with it. Win rate from 17% to 25%+. CAC, counted in months, from 51 to 24. NRR from 96% to 102%.

Now what did not work. None of it happened overnight, and we switched on too many pipeline initiatives along the way. Mid-market is still less stable than SMB, which remains our most predictable motion. NRR is a fight in a market full of AI point solutions. And I would move the first partner seat a year earlier if I ran it again.

My take: the lesson is not that partners are good and outbound is bad. Outbound still carries 29% of pipeline and it is where many enterprise names start. The lesson is that I fund channels by what they convert, not by how much they produce. On latest lead source, partner pipeline is the best money in the building, and it is still under-counted. The expensive pipeline is the pipeline that looks great in volume and closes at 12%.

The European read: a local partner carries trust across a border that a cold sequence cannot. In a country where nobody knows you, a payroll or advisory partner has already met your next customer. That is the fastest route into a second market.

The rule: fund channels on what they convert, never on what they produce. Volume from a 12% channel is the most expensive pipeline you own.

Pipeline share and conversion by channel. The partner row was 0% three years ago.

You know it worked when: blended conversion rises within 2 quarters while pipeline volume holds. Founder read: your best-converting source has a named owner.

The play: The partner ecosystem GTM playbook: drive pipeline and closed-won revenue. The build order for a channel you have been running by accident.

Access this GTMcraft Play [here]

This week’s play to steal

All 3 lessons are about the same thing: which room the work happens in. The cheapest room I have is the one we already pay rent on. When I came into my first market here, nobody knew us outside a small circle. There was no marketing motion and no partner motion. I had an office, and I went looking for the partners my buyers already trusted. That is the play I would run before Christmas.

Play: The events and community system, pipeline in the room

Fixes: events that fill a room and produce no tracked pipeline, because nobody wrote down which open deals and customers were there, or who owns the next step.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams selling mid-market across more than 1 market, with an office or a proud customer in each market and no event budget to speak of.

Template: one row per account in the room. Columns: open opportunity yes or no, stage, owner, next step, date. Any open deal with no next step by the end of the day is the follow-up you already lost.

Paste this into your AI:

Here is the attendee list from my last event with company names and titles: [paste]. Here is my open pipeline export: [paste]. Match the two, list every open opportunity and existing customer that was in the room, and draft 1 next step per account for the named owner. Flag the accounts where nobody from my team spoke to them.

Access this GTMcraft play [HERE]

Why this matters now

Q4 starts on 1 October. The number you close by Christmas is sitting in your pipeline today, and a large share of it will go quiet at least once.

Three weeks before quarter-end is the wrong time to discover marketing had no job on those deals, or that 2 departments were arguing about credit while the buyer drifted.

Move the friction into a room now, while it is cheap.

3 questions for the room

• Which of your quiet deals would move if your marketer owned 1 committee member on it?

• When did your last credit argument happen in a forecast call instead of a review?

• If your regional leaders met every 2 weeks, what problem would surface first?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen

35 leaders in one room, up to 5 leaders per region, 3 closed-lost cycles, 2 to 4 silent weeks, 1 line written down live

Q4 starts on 1 October. Every deal that closes before Christmas is already open.

Most of the large ones will go quiet for 2 to 4 weeks at least once before then. What decides whether they come back is who is in the room when they do.

Last week I got asked about that on the FullFunnel podcast, and my honest answer was not flattering.

Lesson 1: marketing is not in the room where my deals go quiet

Last week I was a guest on a live podcast about account-based marketing and alignment. An hour in, Andrei made a point about deal reviews and I stopped mid-answer to write it down.

Marketing should sit in deal reviews. They are experts in accelerating active pipeline.

I run deal reviews. Marketing is not in them.

They are in plenty of other rooms. The quarterly account plans. The team meetings. Every event. In our offices the marketer sits next to the sales lead.

So the rooms where pipeline gets created are covered. The room where pipeline gets stuck is not.

Earlier this month we had 35 senior leaders in our office. Customers were in that room. Prospects were in that room. After every event we now write down which pipeline was in the room and who owns it.

The instinct is there. My invite list has not caught up.

My take: I have been treating marketing as a top of funnel function and then treating conversion as a sales-only problem. That split is mine, not theirs. Inside a large mid-market cycle there are stretches of 2 to 4 weeks with no heartbeat at all, and people join the committee late who have never heard of us. Reaching a committee member the AE has no line to is exactly what marketing is good at. I am not going to put a marketer in every deal review, because time is real. But the quiet ones, yes. If marketing can only touch a deal before it becomes an opportunity, I have hired half a function.

The European read: a mid-market committee often sits across 2 countries, and the late joiner reads in their own language. Your regional marketer usually has the local assets, the local event and the local partner that reach that person. The AE rarely does.

The rule: marketing’s job does not end at the opportunity. A deal that goes quiet is a marketing problem with a sales deadline.

You know it worked when: days in stage drop on the deals marketing touched, against the ones it did not. Founder read: 2 of your 5 quiet deals have a new named contact within a month.

The play: 5 steps to run team selling that multi-threads every deal. Puts every function with a line to the buying committee on the deal, which is the version where marketing has a job after the opportunity opens.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 2: opened 3 times, credited to a form

One of our mid-market accounts was opened 3 times and closed lost 3 times. The 4th time it opened, we won it.

The CRM credits a web demo request.

The form is real. Someone filled it in on our website, and by our own rule the latest lead source takes the revenue.

The years before that form are also real. Events. BDR calls. A partner who kept us in the conversation. Marketing nurture while the account was not ready and the risk was too big to move.

The form was the last touch. It was nowhere near the first.

I keep the rule anyway. We count latest lead source, and nobody edits that field without a ticket.

The European read: in a smaller market, a larger share of the path runs through partners and events, because cold channels are thinner. A last-touch rule undercounts exactly the work that builds a market from scratch. Read the debatable ones per market, not blended.

The rule: keep the simple credit rule and run the conversation the rule cannot handle. The field is not the fix. The review is.

You know it worked when: credit disputes stop appearing in forecast calls and appear only in the monthly review. Founder read: you can name the first touch on your last 5 wins, not only the last one.

The play: 5 steps to own the logic behind your quotes and deal credit. Splits the comp rule from the reporting rule, which is what stops the quarterly re-argument.

Access this GTMcraft Play [HERE]

Lesson 3: up to 5 leaders per region, each on their own number

Every region I run has 4 or 5 leaders. Country manager, regional marketing, BDR lead, implementation, and account management with customer success.

Each has a department KPI. Marketing owns marketing-sourced pipeline. Partner managers carry partner-sourced. AEs carry closed won.

Each number is defensible on its own. Together they pull in different directions.

I have not fixed that, and I am not sure one shared KPI is the fix.

Instead, my regional leaders meet every week or two, in one room. Pipeline progress. Implementation. Renewals and expansion. The problems nobody wants to raise yet.

You say where you are stuck, and you ask someone in the room for help.

My take: I have learned that more leaders means more sub-KPIs. That is arithmetic, not culture, and I will not remove it. I only get to choose where the friction surfaces. In a room every week or two, while it is cheap. Or in a forecast call in the last week of the quarter, when it is not. The room does something a dashboard cannot. It makes the other department’s problem visible while it is still small, and curiosity follows. None of it holds without the layer above, though. If the senior leaders are not visibly aligned, the room turns into a negotiation. So I start alignment with the people who set the numbers, and the room is where I test it.

The European read: across several markets, each region builds its own version of the friction, with its own leaders and its own history. A central alignment programme will not reach it. A regional room with the local leaders in it will.

The rule: you will not remove the friction between departments. Choose to meet it every 2 weeks, not in the last week of the quarter.

You know it worked when: a problem gets raised by one department and solved by another before it reaches the forecast call. Founder read: your marketer asked your seller for help, unprompted, in the last month.

The play: How to create cross-functional GTM alignment. Builds the shared operating rhythm under the separate KPIs, rather than pretending one number can replace them.

Access this GTMcraft play [HERE]

This week’s play to steal

All 3 lessons are about the same thing: which room the work happens in. The cheapest room I have is the one we already pay rent on. When I came into my first market here, nobody knew us outside a small circle. There was no marketing motion and no partner motion. I had an office, and I went looking for the partners my buyers already trusted. That is the play I would run before Christmas.

Play: The events and community system, pipeline in the room

Fixes: events that fill a room and produce no tracked pipeline, because nobody wrote down which open deals and customers were there, or who owns the next step.

Best for: 2-10M and 10-25M teams selling mid-market across more than 1 market, with an office or a proud customer in each market and no event budget to speak of.

Template: one row per account in the room. Columns: open opportunity yes or no, stage, owner, next step, date. Any open deal with no next step by the end of the day is the follow-up you already lost.

Paste this into your AI:

Here is the attendee list from my last event with company names and titles: [paste]. Here is my open pipeline export: [paste]. Match the two, list every open opportunity and existing customer that was in the room, and draft 1 next step per account for the named owner. Flag the accounts where nobody from my team spoke to them.

Access this GTMcraft play [HERE]

Why this matters now

Q4 starts on 1 October. The number you close by Christmas is sitting in your pipeline today, and a large share of it will go quiet at least once.

Three weeks before quarter-end is the wrong time to discover marketing had no job on those deals, or that 2 departments were arguing about credit while the buyer drifted.

Move the friction into a room now, while it is cheap.

3 questions for the room

• Which of your quiet deals would move if your marketer owned 1 committee member on it?

• When did your last credit argument happen in a forecast call instead of a review?

• If your regional leaders met every 2 weeks, what problem would surface first?

Master your human GTM skills AI can’t replace inside GTMcraft,

Koen

Your (human) GTM Coach

—
PS. Co-written by Wispr + 3 GTMcraft Skills + Claude Opus 5; edited & approved by Koen

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