Judgment Is the Job Now

What five go-to-market leaders agreed on at the TAG Sales Leadership Society panel, and why almost none of it was about the technology.

By Kris Altiere, Chief Marketing Officer · October 23, 2026

Every B2B team is hearing the same thing right now. AI is going to make your people more productive.

But productive at what?

That question kept coming to mind during the TAG Sales Leadership Society panel in Atlanta this week. Jeff Wood of Alexander Group, Jenna Hicks of Sales Talent Group, Russ Stanziale of IDeaS Revenue Solutions, Jennifer Edwards of Euna Solutions and our CEO, Scott Clark, joined moderator Amy Evans of Thrivail for a conversation about AI, sales leadership and what comes next.

The more they talked about AI, the more it came back to something that has very little to do with the technology itself.

Judgment.

AI is changing the work, and it's changing what matters

The panel started with which roles AI will change first. BDRs came up almost immediately. First-line managers kept coming up, too.

Jenna Hicks described the manager's role as moving from firefighter to fire marshal. Less time reacting to problems and more time preventing them in the first place.

That stuck with me.

They also talked about content and how much faster teams can now move from an idea to execution.

These might seem like very different jobs, but they have something in common. We've spent years measuring activity instead of the decisions behind it.

How many calls did the BDR make? How many reports did the manager review? How much content did marketing produce?

But the real value was never the activity itself. It was knowing which accounts were worth pursuing, which reps needed coaching, and which ideas were worth bringing to market.

A lot of the work around those decisions was just overhead. AI is starting to take that away, and what's left is the part that actually requires people to think.

I see this in client conversations, too. Teams run an AI pilot, activity goes up, and everyone celebrates the increased output. But when you ask whether it actually improved results, the answer isn't always clear.

More output doesn't automatically mean better outcomes. Sometimes it just means we're doing more of the same thing, faster.

We don't need 20% more mediocre emails

This was one of my favorite takeaways from the conversation. Jenna Hicks put it best:

The last thing we need is 20% more mediocre emails.

Think about that for a minute.

If AI gives your team more capacity and you use all of it to send more emails, publish more content or generate more activity, what have you really accomplished?

Your competitors have the same tools. Your buyers are already overwhelmed. And now everyone is adding more noise to the same crowded channels.

The technology might be working exactly as intended, but that doesn't mean your marketing or sales is working any better.

One of the more interesting parts of the discussion was the difference between outbound and content. The gains in content production are already obvious. In outbound, the measurable improvements are less clear.

I don't think that's surprising.

When the biggest constraint is how much work a person can get done in a day, AI can make a significant difference. When the constraint is how much attention your buyers have to give, producing more doesn't solve the problem.

In fact, it can make it worse.

AI doesn't automatically give you a competitive advantage. In many cases, it just gets everyone to the same starting line faster.

The advantage comes from what you do with the extra capacity. Better targeting. Better timing. More relevant conversations. Knowing when not to reach out.

Those aren't volume problems. They're judgment problems. It's also most of what we build into a GTMx engine for clients, and the reason targeting comes before activation rather than after it.

Maybe it's time to rethink who we're hiring

The hiring conversation was interesting because of what people didn't say.

Curiosity came up repeatedly. So did judgment, emotional intelligence and the willingness to challenge the way things have always been done.

Nobody talked about hiring people based on which AI tools they know how to use.

Scott had a great way to test this in an interview. Don't ask candidates whether they use AI. Everyone is going to say yes.

Ask them where they've decided not to use it, and why.

That tells you a lot more about how someone thinks than a list of tools on their resume ever will.

And it brings me to another point that really stuck with me:

If your go-to-market strategy hasn't changed in two years, you might be hiring for a business that no longer exists.

Technology has changed. Buyer behavior has changed. Growth expectations have changed.

But job descriptions often haven't.

You can't keep the same strategy, hire for the same roles and expect different results just because you've added AI to the mix.

A company moving from mid-market into enterprise needs a different sales approach, different skills and often a different team structure. Before you hire, you need to understand where the business is going and what it will take to get there.

Otherwise, you might hire the perfect person for the wrong job.

Most of the teams we talk to find this out in the wrong order. They hire first, wait three quarters, and only then look at whether the strategy underneath the role was still current. It's the first thing a GTM assessment looks at, and it's usually the cheapest problem on the list to fix.

How much time are we wasting arguing about the wrong things?

Another conversation that resonated with me was about attribution.

One team realized it was spending too much time debating whose numbers were right and not enough time actually solving problems. So sales, marketing, product marketing and customer success moved to a shared dashboard and started meeting monthly to discuss trends instead of fighting over credit.

I love this approach.

I've seen how much time teams can spend trying to prove which channel, campaign or person deserves credit for a result.

Meanwhile, the customer doesn't care who gets credit. They care about whether you understand their problem and can help solve it.

And buyers are doing more research on their own before they ever talk to sales. They're visiting websites, checking LinkedIn, reading reviews and increasingly using AI tools to compare their options.

By the time they reach out, the journey has already happened across multiple touchpoints. Trying to give one of those touches all the credit can create a very precise answer to the wrong question.

We need data. We need to understand what's working. But we also need to stop confusing measurement with progress.

One shared view of the business. Regular conversations about what the data is telling us. Less time arguing about credit and more time deciding what to do next.

That's a change teams can make without buying another tool.

What should GTM teams actually focus on next year?

The panel had different perspectives on growth priorities. Some teams are focused on new logos. Others are looking at expansion.

The important part is knowing which one you're trying to achieve.

Winning new customers and growing existing accounts require different approaches. They don't necessarily need the same people, processes or measures of success, either.

The same goes for every other priority. Start with what the business needs to accomplish, then use the data to help determine where to focus.

Don't decide what you want to do first and then go looking for numbers to justify it.

We also heard some interesting perspectives on channels. In-person events are getting more budget again, and some teams are seeing direct mail outperform digital in their testing.

Meanwhile, PR, Wikipedia and credible source material are becoming more important as companies think about how they show up in AI-generated answers.

That makes sense to me. Buyers are forming opinions and building shortlists long before they fill out a form or talk to sales.

If you're only thinking about marketing once someone enters your funnel, you're already missing a big part of the picture.

As digital channels get noisier, being visible, credible and useful earlier in the buying journey matters even more.

The real opportunity isn't doing more

Here's what I keep coming back to.

AI is making it easier to produce, analyze and execute. That's exciting, and there's real value in it.

But the technology isn't going to decide which customers matter most to your business. It isn't going to fix an outdated GTM strategy or tell you which internal meeting is a waste of everyone's time.

Those decisions are still ours to make.

As marketers and sales leaders, we need to get better at asking the right questions, challenging assumptions and connecting what our teams do every day to what the business is actually trying to achieve.

We need to hire people who can think, not just execute. Give them the tools to do their jobs better, then give them the space to use their judgment.

Because the goal isn't to get 20% more work out of your team.

It's to make the work that matters better.

And if we're not thinking about that, we're just using better technology to do more of what we've always done.

Thanks to the TAG Sales Leadership Society for bringing everyone together, and to the panel for an honest and thoughtful conversation.

Kris Altiere is CMO of MicroHalos, where she leads marketing, brand and demand generation. She has spent her career building go-to-market programs for B2B technology companies.