The Modern GTM Team: What I'll be bringing to the TAG Sales Leadership Society panel
On October 22 in Atlanta, I'm joining a panel on how commercial teams are being rebuilt. Here's what's on my mind going in.
Back in May, I sat on a TAG Sales Leadership Society panel about the modern sales stack. We spent most of the hour on tools: Clay, AI for research, automation, and where it all fits. The thing I kept coming back to afterward wasn't any of the tools. It was the people. You can buy every tool on the market, and if the team around them is built the way it was in 2015, not much changes.
So I'm glad that's where we're going next. On Thursday, October 22, I'm joining TAG's Sales Leadership Society again for The Modern GTM Team, a panel on how commercial teams are being rebuilt. We'll cover roles, structure, and technology. Amy Evans is moderating, and I'm on the panel with four other commercial leaders.
Here's what's on my mind going in.
The seller's job is changing, and that's a good thing
For decades the playbook was the same. You need to grow, so you hire experienced sellers with big Rolodexes. It works, until they run through their relationships. Then those expensive, talented people end up spending their days figuring out who to call instead of selling.
What I see now is that the research, the targeting, and the first draft can all be done upstream by a system. That doesn't shrink the seller's job. It makes it more human. What's left is the part a system can't do: earning trust, reading the politics inside an account, and knowing whether a deal is real. That's a more senior job than the old prospecting seat, and I think we should be hiring for it that way.
Not every leadership seat needs to be full time
I'll be honest, we run our own company this way. Some of our senior leaders work with us fractionally: senior people who have carried revenue at large companies, here for part of the week, focused on the work where their experience counts most. We build our BDR team the same way.
A lot of the companies we work with could never assemble that kind of experience full time. A fraction of five or six senior people, pulled together into one team, gets you further than one full-time hire trying to do everything. The catch is that fractional leadership only works with execution underneath it. Otherwise you get a great plan that nobody delivers.
The hardest part isn't the technology
If May taught me anything, it's that the tools are the easy part. One of my fellow panelists told a story about pulling a few hundred enriched contacts into the CRM and ending up in an ethics investigation over it. Nothing he did was wrong. The rest of the organization just hadn't caught up with how modern sellers work.
That's the real work for sales leaders right now. It's bringing legal, compliance, IT, and finance along, so your team can spend its time selling instead of explaining itself.
I'd like to hear from you
I'm going in with questions as much as answers. If you lead a sales, marketing, or RevOps team, I'd love to know:
- Which role on your team has changed the most in the last year?
- What did you stop doing because a system does it now?
- Where has AI let you down?
Send me a note on LinkedIn before Thursday or bring it to the Q&A. And if you can't make it, we'll post a recap of what came up in the room, including the parts where the panel didn't agree.
If you're already in the middle of rebuilding your own commercial team, I'm always happy to have that conversation one on one. Connect with me on LinkedIn.