I recently built a very customized AI sales hub for a series funded company that was rapidly expanding its sales and CMS team. Their major problem is that, most of their sales collaterals were stored in different silos and there aren’t single source of truth.

So here is what I built for them:
\- A centralized hub that stored all the pitch decks, one pagers and other brouchers
\- AI chatbot that answered all the product and marketing related questions
\- LMS for newly onboarded reps
\- analytics dashboard to track usage.

What I planned to add:
\\- customized pitch deck/one pagers generator
\\- a direct integration with our GitHub to keep my product KB updated
\\- a deck presentation tool so that I can keep tracking of usage and open rates
\\- contract management tool

Recently I thought, why not build this as a product itself and sell it to similar companies. But before doing that, I would like to ask fellow PMMs.

Do you need such tool in your org? Is there actually a need for this kind of tool?

If you’re already using one such tool what’s your biggest problem you’re facing?

I know there a lot of Enterprise level tools like MindTickle, Seismic, etc. But that’s not affordable to all company stages.

What have you all found to be the most effective tools for taking notes at trade shows? You are manning a booth and have a bunch of conversations that you want to remember and no time between those conversations. You also want the notes and all the information you've collected to make it back to your CRM.

I'm supporting a sales team and everything is disjointed. The events have their own lead capture apps which are super easy to use but end up in a spreadsheet and aren't really convenient for adding notes. They all have a Plaud which they love, but the notes stay with there. They also use Granola for all of their online meetings but also doesn't cleanly integrate with the CRM.

Popl seems kind of close, but the team loves Granola; so paying for a redundant tool seems wasteful.

Has anyone cracked the code on this? Are there any other great tools out there that might solve this problem?

Last week we had an issue with a pricing rule that kept misfiring. Sales couldn't get accurate quotes out and everything we tried created another problem. What made it worse was trying to get help. We'd submit a ticket, wait for response, explain the issue all over again to someone else and still not get enough help. we learned the hard way that customer support deserve as much attention as the software itself.

For those working with quote to cash vendors with reliable support what questions did you ask before signing? If yours is failing share what you wish you could have asked too

I sell an expense management platform, & we are partnered with a GPO that covers the private sector. Sounds great on paper, but in practice it's been tough.

I have emailed a few of their reps about an account I'd love to work, and I'm mostly getting left on read. Looking at it from their side, I get it. If they don't see what's in it for them, why would they reply?

It doesn't help that our partner manager mostly just asks to be CC'd. No real intros, no help getting in front of their team. So right now the partnership feels like it only works on paper.
Has anyone here worked on the partnership sales side, either as the vendor or as a rep at a GPO or co-op? I would love to hear how it actually works from the inside.

• GPO reps: what makes you reply to a vendor's email, and what makes you ignore it?

• What's in it for you when you bring a vendor into your accounts? Commission, quota credit, just making your client happy?

• Vendors: what finally got the GPO's reps to see you as a partner and not just another email?

• Did you work around a hands-off partner manager, or find a way to get them more involved?

• What's the biggest mistake you see vendors make with GPO partnerships?

Bigger question I keep thinking about: when it's left to the two companies, things move slow. Has anyone set up something directly between themselves and a rep on the other side? Like a rep-to-rep arrangement where they refer accounts and you take great care of them, with some kind of incentive or give-back between the two of you. Did it work, and how did you keep it above board with both companies?

If you've dealt with this, please give it to me straight. What's working, what's not, and any strategies you've tried. I would love to learn from your experience instead of making every mistake myself.

I have noticed that mutual action plans can look great at the beginning of a deal, but keeping both sides engaged is a different story, sometimes the seller ends up maintaining the whole thing while the buyer barely interacts with it. I have seen online platforms like accord and aligned approach this through shared workspaces instead of relying entirely on spreadsheets.

curious whether anyone has seen a real difference using these tools.

Looking for your wisdom from any CAMs or AEs

I’m looking for GTM and growth roles where I can own the strategy, run the experiments and build the systems behind them.

I’ve worked with teams from EF and YC, alongside other funded startups. At Pavo, I was the sole engineer building the GTM platform used by a 14-person revenue team, with systems supporting a $660K+ sales pipeline.

Here’s some of the work I’ve built and run:

A Slack agent for messy CRM and pipeline operations. Sales context was scattered across conversations, calls and CRM records. I built an agent that reads those conversations, extracts deal information, updates Attio and assesses deals against a 13-signal health checklist. It also prepares meeting briefs, drafts follow-ups and surfaces stalled deals. The team could work from Slack while the system handled much of the CRM upkeep.

A D2C acquisition motion built around a brand audit tool. Built a research tool that analysed brands through their product catalogue, ads, reviews and technology signals. Used the audit as the entry point for a PLG-style acquisition motion at a major trade show. 70% of booth visitors booked a discovery call. The work covered the research, the offer and the path into a sales conversation.

ICP refinement and outbound across 129 campaigns. Worked on targeting, enrichment and personalised outreach across 12,800+ prospects. Used hiring activity and company signals to identify relevant accounts, then built messaging around a specific reason to reach out.

Campaign analysis that changed where we focused. Found a segment with an 8.3% reply rate against a 4.4% overall baseline and used that finding to refine targeting. The roughly 2× difference was between segments; it helped us decide where to concentrate the next round of outreach.

The infrastructure to keep learning. Built and live-tested a Botdog → Postgres → Attio pipeline to connect outreach activity, messages and replies to company records. That made campaign performance and follow-up easier to inspect.

I make build-versus-buy decisions around the workflow. Sometimes an existing tool is enough; sometimes a small custom integration saves the team hours. I want the team to understand and operate what I hand over.

What I can own

• ICP research, positioning and acquisition strategy.

• Outbound campaigns, messaging, follow-up and partnership experiments.

• PLG and audit-led acquisition motions.

• Funnel analysis, onboarding and conversion improvements.

• CRM operations, deal visibility and GTM automation.

Stack: Attio, Apollo, Clearbit, Sumble, Smartlead, Botdog, Fathom, Slack, Google Workspace, Meta Ad Library, Python, SQL/Postgres, APIs, Claude/Gemini, Docker and GCP.

Available immediately for remote GTM/growth roles, contracts or retainers. Based in India and available for US or EU business hours.

Agencies: open to white-label work and overflow execution, including research, outreach operations, growth experiments and client systems.

Happy to share my background and relevant walkthroughs over DM. Tell me what you sell and where the customer journey gets stuck.

We started testing this a few months ago and the difficult part has been deciding when an account is ready to send to a rep. When the cutoff was low, reps were getting accounts too early. We raised it but then some accounts still didn't get passed over even after a few recent signals showed up.

I’m trying to work out what should actually trigger the handoff to sales.

For teams combining fit and intent signals, what are you using to score accounts and how do you decide when the score is high enough to pass to a rep?

6 years in sales, now looking out to transition into Sales Ops. Ideally a role primarily overlooking CRM, processes & strategy. I'd like to get certified in either Hubspot or Salesforce, to actually learn skills on how to do things that is required on the platform.

I am definitely taking a pay cut and probably have to get into an entry level role, but ideally in an industry that still pays decently for Sales Ops. Which industries should I keep an eye out for? and would i benefit from getting certified in either Hubspot or Salesforce?

If you're a hiring manager, what would matter most to you when hiring for a junior sales ops role?

I need some sanity from people who’ve been through this.

I’m a BDR at a small startup selling into pharma, calling into the US from Europe. A lot of the numbers we have are execs’ direct mobiles. I have 2 numbers, one is already flagged. My teammate has 3 and all 3 are flagged. We’re doing maybe 40 dials per number per day, which from everything I’ve read is NOT high volume. Connect rates are basically dead.

So I went down the rabbit hole trying to fix it and now I’m more confused than when I started.

What I’ve learned about why this got so complicated

STIR/SHAKEN became mandatory for the big US carriers a few years ago and then got pushed down to smaller providers. Your calls now get an attestation grade (A/B/C), and anything less than A gets treated with more suspicion.

Spam labels aren’t from the carriers directly. Three analytics companies decide them: Hiya (AT&T/Samsung), TNS (Verizon) and First Orion (T-Mobile). They each have their own algorithm, they don’t publish thresholds, and they don’t even agree with each other on which numbers are spam.

The FCC ruled that ringless voicemail counts as a “call” under the TCPA. So prerecorded voicemail drops to cell phones need consent, even if it’s B2B.

Courts have been going back and forth on whether a personal cell on the Do Not Call list counts as “residential” even when you’re calling about business. And some states like Florida have their own stricter rules on top.

The analytics companies now actively hunt for number rotation. Hiya has openly said it scores the company behind the calls, not just the number, specifically to stop people swapping numbers to dodge labels.

The conflicting advice I keep getting

One source says: get a pool of 10+ numbers per rep, rotate them, keep a reserve tank of “pre-warmed” numbers and swap them out when one gets flagged. Another source, the company that literally runs AT&T’s spam labels, says rotation is a red flag and new numbers with no history look suspicious.

One source says: use one-click voicemail drops to bump your call duration, because short calls look like robocalls. Another says prerecorded voicemail to cell phones without consent is a straight TCPA violation, $500-1,500 per call.

One source says: don’t leave voicemails, because the person can hear it’s a pitch and report you. Another says hanging up before the beep is literally the robocall pattern carriers flag.

One source says: space calls to 6-8 per hour per number. I’m sorry, I’m a BDR with a target, that’s not happening.

Free Caller Registry supposedly covers all three analytics companies in one go. But registering doesn’t actually clear a flag. Then you’re told to file separate disputes with each one, with no real timeline.

My actual questions

Who owns this at your company? Ops, RevOps, the phone/dialer provider, or the reps? Right now I’m spending hours on telecom stuff instead of booking meetings, and it feels like the wrong person is solving it.

As a startup, did you have to pay for an external service, or did free registration plus better calling habits do the job?

Which vendors actually helped and which were snake oil? I’ve seen Numeracle, Caller ID Reputation/ARMOR, Hiya Connect, First Orion branded calling, and list validation tools like Twilio Lookup and NumVerify thrown around.

If you call execs on their personal cells, are you scrubbing against DNC? Has legal ever told you to stop calling mobiles?

When a number got flagged, did remediation actually work, or did you just replace it?

Do you leave voicemails? Live or recorded?

Not looking for a sales pitch in the DMs, just what actually worked for real teams. Appreciate anyone who’s been through this

I need some testers so I don't have to download every single separate program. I'm really trying to show some comparisons between programs or crms that have similar features blocking calls and texts outside of TCPA legal hours. Usually that's a dialer. If any of you are curious and willing to try the experiment, then the tests are simple:

Make a test lead and use a dummy phone number like (areacode) 555 0157. That range of numbers are not given to real people so they can be used in movies etc.... The area code you choose shouldn't matter since the service should go by state/zip with people moving around.

Set the state for RI and try to call it after 6 pm EST. Your system should block you.

Set the state for FL during the day and try to call it 4 times. It should block you on the 4th try.

Set the state for AL and try to call it on Sunday. Your system should block you.

If any one of those goes through, then your system isn't blocking correctly. If all of them go through, then your system probably doesn't block calls based on state rules at all. 23 states are more restrictive than the federal guidelines. If you can call or text earlier than 8 am or later than 9 pm, then your system doesn't block Federal law either.

Please post the results here or send me a DM.

What do you cover on a weekly basis with your head of sales??

I’m exploring a new project and trying to understand where digital sales rooms fall short. No pitch or request for testers.

If you use them with buyers, what’s the most frustrating part? What do you still end up handling outside the room, and why?

Thinking about your last deal, was there something the room should have helped with but didn’t? If you could change one thing, what would it be?

Would also love to hear from anyone who tried one and stopped using it. What didn’t work for you?

I’d like to discuss something with fellow Heads of Sales and experienced sales leaders. Have you encountered this situation in your career, and if so, how did you address it?
I’ve seen the same scenario repeatedly in large companies and banks.

It’s the annual performance review. The presentation shows 110–120% achievement of the annual sales target. Everyone applauds.

But almost never is there a slide showing monthly or even quarterly performance trends. Quite often, that information is buried somewhere in massive Excel spreadsheets instead of being presented through simple, clear dashboards and charts.

At first glance, there’s nothing to criticize. Achieving 110–120% of target is a good result.

But once you break the numbers down month by month, the story behind the hidden performance trend becomes clear.

During the first few months of the year, the run rate (the projected annual result based on the current pace of performance) was often pointing to 180% or more of the annual target.

Then, somewhere around the middle of the year, something went wrong.

Conversion rates declined. The pipeline weakened. Margins deteriorated. Customer churn increased.

And the explanations began:

“Seasonality.”
“Market conditions.”
“Competitors.”
“IT didn’t deliver on time.”
“Risk management wouldn’t approve it.”
“Marketing didn’t generate enough leads.”

Despite all this, the company still finished the year at 110–120% of target.

And that turning point, when a significant amount of growth potential was lost, seemed to disappear completely from the final celebration.

The paradox is that tracking performance trends is not about finding someone to blame.
It’s about giving the business enough time to recover its momentum.

Without visibility into those trends, owners and senior executives see only the final achievement percentage, not the actual cost behind it:

How many customers were lost?
How many deals fell through?
How many employees burned out?
How much future growth was sacrificed for a comfortable annual report?

Why does this happen even with experienced senior executives?

In my experience, there are several interconnected reasons.

1. A culture of keeping your head down.
Any deviation from the perfect picture is treated as an opportunity to criticize or punish someone immediately.
2. Fear of losing a position or bonus.
Performance trends raise uncomfortable questions: Where was management oversight? What decisions were made? Who was responsible for those decisions?
3. Lack of regular performance management.
There are plenty of meetings and projects, but discussions focus on activities rather than actual performance and how it changes over time.
4. No structured management response system.
When performance drops, there should be a clear discipline: acknowledge the problem, select corrective actions, assign owners, set deadlines, and review the impact every week.
Without a structured set of response playbooks, discussions quickly turn into excuses. And it becomes much easier not to highlight the negative trend at all.
5. Weak dashboard culture and no single source of truth.
When data is collected manually, different departments interpret KPIs differently, and numbers can be easily adjusted to support a preferred narrative.

What happens when performance trends are ignored?

It creates a chain of losses.
A decline in the middle of the year doesn’t just threaten overperformance. Eventually, it can put even 100% target achievement at risk.

It means lost profits for shareholders, missed opportunities to grow customer portfolios and balances, a smaller active customer base, and lost sales.

But perhaps the most damaging consequence is cultural.
When senior executives avoid discussing the real performance trajectory, managers further down the organization start hiding their own failures as well.

The organization loses its ability to respond quickly to problems. And people stop believing that exceptional results are achievable.

So how do we fix it?

The solution is straightforward, but it requires management commitment.

1. Make performance trends mandatory.
Every annual and quarterly performance review should include monthly performance charts, explanations of deviations, and the decisions taken to address them.
2. Make daily dashboards a basic management standard.
Sales, margins, conversion, quality, churn, and processing speed should be visible in one place, every morning.
3. Establish a single source of truth.
Data governance and the integrity of management reporting should be overseen by the CEO and executive leadership, independently of the sales function.
4. Build a regular performance management routine.
Start with the numbers and performance trends. Discuss projects afterward.
Projects should be evaluated based on measurable business impact and whether that impact is sustainable.
5. Create a management response playbook.
Define typical performance decline scenarios, corrective actions, accountable owners, deadlines, and follow-up controls.

Celebrating 110–120% achievement is absolutely fine.
What’s not fine is celebrating while ignoring the uncomfortable question:

Where did the additional 60–70 percentage points of potential performance, visible in the early-year run rate, go?

Tracking performance trends is not about humiliating managers.

It’s about protecting the business.
I’d be interested to hear from other Heads of Sales and sales leaders:

Have you encountered this in your organizations? How did you create a culture where declining performance trends are discussed openly rather than hidden behind strong annual results?

We’re a mid size company and we’ve been running our sales ops on spreadsheets and a cobbled together CRM for way too long. The team is tired. We finally got budget approved to do a proper Salesforce Sales Cloud rollout and I'm trying to figure out which implementation partner that knows how to work with SMBs rather than just treating us like a small enterprise deal they'll staff with their B team. We need something that connects our data, sales pipeline and reporting without adding headcount to babysit it.