# The GTM Circle — full content > Complete text of every GTM Insights essay published by The GTM Circle, an invite-only network of Seed through Series D B2B GTM leaders facilitated by focal.vc. --- ## Hiring a VP of Sales is not a go-to-market strategy Bringing in a senior sales leader before you understand your motion doesn't create one. It just adds cost. Category: Sales · Published: Sep 2025 · Author: Jerry Barsz, Head of US Sales (Optimize Health) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/vp-of-sales-is-not-a-strategy Startups often decide to hire a VP of Sales, thinking it will unlock growth. In reality, if that hire is made too early, it almost always creates confusion, stalls progress, and leads to blame. It usually happens after a fundraise. The founder is overwhelmed. Investors want momentum. The team needs help. So the answer becomes: bring in someone to run sales. But here is the problem. There is nothing to run yet. No repeatable process. No validated ICP. No consistency in buyer behavior. Just a few early wins, a lot of pressure, and a vague number to hit. That VP shows up into uncertainty. They are handed a foggy funnel, unclear messaging, a product that is still changing, and no real insight into why deals are won or lost. They try to build a team. They try to impose structure. And within 6 to 12 months, they are often shown the door. This is not theory. According to SaaStr, more than 70 percent of first-time VPs of Sales at startups fail within 12 months. Their average tenure is less than 18 months. **70%+** — of first-time VPs of Sales at startups fail within 12 months — average tenure under 18 (SaaStr) The issue is not them. The issue is timing. Most of these hires were brought in to manage something that did not exist yet. ### Why I Believe This I have seen this mistake play out more than once—not just in companies I have advised, but also inside companies I have worked for. At Optimize Health, a remote care focused healthcare startup, I joined as the first commercial hire. No sales motion. No revenue. No team. What worked was staying very close to the founders who were building the product, testing messaging, and driving early traction—and just as close to the market. Talking with prospects. Listening to customers. Figuring out what worked and what did not. Over time, we built real traction. We found consistency. Then we scaled. Now, through Altus Growth Partner, a small advisory practice I run on the side, I talk with early-stage founders who are navigating this same tension. They want help. They want sales momentum. But most of the time, they do not need a VP yet. They need clarity. They need someone who can help them figure out what works before trying to scale it. And yes, I am still in it. I still work every day at Optimize Health. We are in the process of making a significant branding pivot, and we are still learning in real time. That experience continues to shape how I think about go-to-market and what early stage teams actually need to move forward. Practical Takeaway: Do not hire someone to manage until you have something worth managing. The better move is to hire someone who can learn fast, adapt quickly, and persuade often. Someone who thrives in ambiguity and helps create consistency. When that consistency shows up, then the process follows. Then the structure. Then the scale. --- ## Your attribution efforts are a waste of time, money, and sanity The dashboard that promises to tell you what's working is usually the thing quietly telling you nothing. Category: Marketing · Published: Jul 2025 · Author: Brett Van Buskirk, VP of Marketing (Data People) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/attribution-is-a-waste My Thinking: The pursuit of perfect attribution is a fool's errand. Is it first touch, last touch, or most time spent? How should we weigh digital vs. in-person interactions? Who cares, here's why: - The Impossible Journey: Customers rarely follow a linear path. They interact with countless touchpoints – often unmeasurable ones (word-of-mouth, offline events, subconscious brand impressions) – before converting. Attribution models attempt to assign credit to discrete, trackable events, ignoring the vast, messy reality of the buyer's journey. - Last-Touch Fallacy (and others): While simple, last-touch attribution gives all credit to the final interaction, ignoring everything before. Multi-touch models are more sophisticated but still rely on assumptions about the value of each touchpoint, which are often arbitrary and rarely reflect true impact. - The Human Element: Marketing influences human behavior. People don't convert because of a single ad; they convert because of a cumulative understanding, trust, and perceived value built over time. Attribution models struggle to quantify this. - Resource Drain: Building, maintaining, and defending complex attribution models consumes significant time, budget, and analytical talent that could be better spent on actual growth initiatives. - Internal Conflict: When every team's bonus or budget depends on "proving" their attribution, it fosters a combative environment. Marketing channels become silos, fighting over credit rather than collaborating to serve customer and company goals. Sales blames marketing for poor leads, marketing blames sales for not closing, and "attribution" becomes the weapon of choice to deflect blame for poor performance. - Short-Termism: The need to demonstrate immediate attributable ROI often pushes teams towards short-term, easily trackable tactics at the expense of crucial long-term brand building, content strategy, or experimental initiatives that are harder to tie directly to revenue. - So What?: Let's imagine, for a moment, you could perfectly attribute every dollar of revenue to every specific marketing or sales touchpoint. What would you do differently? Would you suddenly stop investing in brand awareness because its ROI is harder to pinpoint? Would you completely eliminate channels that contribute indirectly but are vital to the overall customer experience? - Optimization, Not Elimination: The goal should be optimization and impact, not just assigning credit. Understanding influence and lift across the entire customer journey is far more valuable than precise, but often meaningless, attribution assessments. - Focus on Outcomes, Not Inputs: Instead of trying to slice the pie differently based on attribution, focus on the overall growth of the pie: customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (LTV), brand strength, and market share. These are the true indicators of marketing effectiveness. The Practical Takeaway: Focus on Contribution, Not Just Attribution Instead of chasing the attribution dragon, redirect your energy and resources towards understanding and optimizing the contributory impact of your marketing and sales efforts across the entire customer journey: - Define Clear Business Outcomes First: What are your ultimate goals? (e.g., pipeline growth, customer retention, market penetration). Ensure these are shared across the entire GTM team and work backward from these, not from individual channel metrics. - Overall ROI: What's the aggregate return on your GTM spend? - Cohort Analysis: How do different customer cohorts behave over time, regardless of their initial touchpoint? - Channel/Experience Influence: What influence may a channel or experience have? When it most commonly positive or present? - Brand Health Metrics: Track awareness, perception, and sentiment if possible. - Surveys & Qualitative Feedback: Ask customers how they discovered you and what influenced their decision. This provides invaluable "untrackable" insights. - Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Break down silos. Marketing, sales, and product teams should work together on shared revenue goals. They should develop a comprehensive understanding of how each contributes in different, yet equally vital ways. - Invest in Experimentation & Learning: Dedicate budget to testing new channels and strategies, even if their direct attribution is murky. Focus on learning what drives overall growth and customer satisfaction. Do not strive for a specific ROI and payback period for these tests. Align leadership expectations appropriately. The pursuit of attribution makes academic sense. However, in the pursuit of arriving at a handful of discrete drivers of GTM success, our distillation loses nuances and insight. It pits teams and tactics against each other, creating a disjointed GTM motion that is more interested in personal victory than shared success. A shift from attribution demands a shift in mindset but leads to more effective, collaborative, and ultimately, more impactful marketing. A larger, messier piece, is always better than a perfectly attributed smaller pie. --- ## Companies are buying ChatGPT when they need Excel Reaching for the most advanced tool is easy. Knowing which problem you actually have is the hard part. Category: AI × GTM · Published: Aug 2025 · Author: Chris Sterry, Co-founder (HelixML) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/chatgpt-when-you-need-excel ### My Contrarian Take Enterprise AI isn't about buying more tools—it's about killing your existing workflow complexity. I know that sounds backwards, but hear me out. Every executive I talk to is racing to sprinkle AI fairy dust across their organization, burning millions on shiny generative AI platforms while completely missing what's actually happening. Most enterprise AI implementations? They're just elaborate exercises in corporate self-delusion. Companies keep asking for custom AI integrations when what they actually need is someone to automate their expense reports. ### Why They’re Missing the Point I've sat through more enterprise AI deals than I care to count, and 90% of these pilots fail. Not because the technology sucks, but because companies are trying to force generative AI into their existing, broken processes instead of just... starting over. It's like trying to make a horse-drawn carriage faster by strapping a tiny motor to it. You're solving the wrong problem. The pattern drives me nuts. Executives see a ChatGPT demo, get stars in their eyes, then tell their teams to "implement AI across the organization." What they get back is expensive prompt engineering projects that feel innovative but don't actually change how work gets done. Meanwhile, the boring AI that could automate their invoice processing sits there ignored because it's not sexy enough. From a sales perspective, we're all selling the wrong thing. Customers come to us asking for generative AI because that's what they've heard about. But what they actually need? Basic workflow automation that just happens to use AI under the hood. The companies that are actually winning with AI do one thing differently: they eliminate entire workflow stages instead of making them slightly better. They're not optimizing their existing mess—they're replacing it completely. Take contract review. Most companies want AI tools to help their legal teams review contracts faster. But some companies are eliminating the legal bottleneck entirely for standard agreements. They're using AI to automatically negotiate, redline, and approve 80% of vendor contracts without any human touching them. What used to take 6 weeks and kill deals now happens in 24 hours. That's not incremental improvement. That's elimination of the thing sales teams complain about most. But selling this is way harder. It's easier to pitch "we'll help your lawyers review contracts 40% faster" than "we're going to eliminate your legal review process for most contracts." One's a software purchase. The other requires convincing general counsel to fundamentally rethink risk management. ### One Thing That Actually Works Founding an AI company, I have the luxury to try new things. After watching too many demos crash and burn, I started looking at my most repetitive workflows, then I challenged myself to eliminate 30% of them. Not optimize. Not improve. Eliminate. I picked the stuff that made me want to bang my head against the wall every week. Weekly pipeline reviews where we'd spend 2 hours going through the same spreadsheet asking the same questions. Monthly customer health check meetings that were just status updates in disguise. Those painful quarterly business reviews where everyone pretended the deck was actually useful. What I found was wild—most of these workflows existed because "that's how we've always done it," not because they actually drove results. So I started experimenting with AI to just... make them disappear. The weekly pipeline review? Now it's an AI-generated report that hits my inbox every Monday morning with the insights that actually matter. The customer health checks? Automated alerts when something needs attention, plus a monthly dashboard. Those QBRs? The AI pulls the real insights and I just focus on the strategic conversations. I got 8 hours of my week back. I can spend on deals, on product strategy, on actually building the company. Then I started asking prospects the same question I asked myself: "What's the one workflow in your organization that, if it just disappeared tomorrow, would make everyone's life dramatically better?" The responses are incredible. One CFO looked me dead in the eye and said, "If our month-end close process just vanished and the numbers appeared automatically, I'd get 40 hours of my life back every month." That's when you know you're having the right conversation. People stop thinking "how can AI help my team work faster" and start thinking "what if my team didn't have to do this at all?" The deals that come from these conversations are 10x bigger than the ones that start with feature demos. --- ## 75% of the calls your VP of Sales joins should be customer calls A sales leader who lives in internal meetings slowly forgets what the market is telling them. Category: Sales · Published: Jul 2025 · Author: Debra Senra URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/vp-sales-customer-calls Sales leaders love to say they’re customer-obsessed, but then spend 90% of their time chasing new business and almost none of it listening to the customers they’ve already won. If you want better messaging, tighter alignment with CS, and a team that sells what you can actually deliver, your VP of Sales should be spending most of their time in customer conversations. I'm not talking about putting out fires. I'm talking about QBRs, EBRs, save calls, and renewals. These are the moments where you hear what matters most. Why customers stay. What they actually value. How their perception of your product has changed over time. These stories are your sales pitch, and they evolve constantly. If you’re not in the room to hear them directly, you’re relying on secondhand interpretations (or outdated information) to shape your strategy. You’ll also hear the hard stuff. Where your message falls flat. Where your team is selling the dream, and your CS team is servicing the nightmare. This isn’t someone else's problem. Word spreads. These mismatches create detractors and kill your next deal before it even starts. These calls will show you exactly how to refine your pitch, how to align it with reality, and when to update your ICP. Spending time in these conversations also creates a shared language with your CS counterparts. You may still disagree, but you’ll be on the same field, solving the same problems, together. And when you bring these insights back to your team, they get better. More context. More precision. More confidence. That is, by far, the most impactful thing you can do as a leader of the sales organization. ### One Tip You Can Use Right Now Set a calendar rhythm with your CS counterpart today. Pick one QBR, one save call, and one renewal call each month that you will join. Agree on your role. Will you speak? Take notes? Be a visible participant or listen quietly? Ask how you can add value. Offer to return the favor by having the CS leader join key sales calls. Before you do anything, explain to both teams what you're doing and why. Make it clear this isn’t about oversight. It’s about partnership. And if you say you’re just there to listen, keep your word. --- ## Most early-stage startups should not have a partnerships function Partnerships feel like free distribution. Early on they're usually a slow way to avoid selling. Category: Growth · Published: Jun 2025 · Author: Halle Kaplan-Allen, Head of Marketing (Sydecar) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/no-partnerships-function-early It’s tempting to launch “partnerships” early, especially when other companies in your space have done so. There's a lot of positive energy around early stage startups who want to collaborate with one enough to be force multiples. In practice, I find partnerships to be more of a distraction than a value add for early stage startups (pre ~Series C). The issue is that partnerships means something different to everyone. Marketing thinks it’s co-branded content. Product thinks it’s integrations. Sales thinks it’s referral channels. And leadership might think its a magic silver bullet. ### Instead, it usually ends up being: - Loosely defined collaborations with unclear goals - Unstructured "biz dev" conversations - Co-branded articles or one pagers - Relationship management that is completely detached from pipeline or revenue What is often branded as "partnerships" would be more valuable if each aspect of it lived with the appropriate team and was measured against those teams KPIs. For instead: - Sales owns channel partnerships and is measured by revenue generated - Marketing owns co-marketing and is measured by MQLs generated - Product owns technical integrations and is measured by implementation time One practical takeaway: Before building out a partnerships function, ask: Where should this work actually live? If it maps to pipeline or qualified leads, give it to sales. If it’s about brand or reach, give it to marketing. If it’s about creating an integration, given it to product. Then, set real metrics and revisit them every quarter. --- ## Stop forcing channels. Distribution isn't one-size-fits-all The channel that made another company famous is not automatically yours to copy. Category: Growth · Published: Jul 2025 · Author: Max Leblond, VP of Marketing (Local Logic) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/distribution-not-one-size-fits-all Most GTM teams are running on borrowed playbooks and influencer-fueled templates that have nothing to do with the realities of their industry. We’ve been conditioned to think “this is how you grow” because someone on LinkedIn got a few thousand likes saying cold outbound is back, and gone, and back again, or that you need a podcast, or that PLG is the only answer. Here’s the truth: no one knows your market better than you. And trying to force a trendy strategy into a space where it doesn’t belong is a fast track to wasted budget, burned-out teams, and missed opportunities. Why I believe this: At Local Logic, I market to some of the most legacy-heavy, risk-averse segments in North American real estate, including MLSs, brokerages, and enterprise portals. These aren’t industries that “go viral.” They don’t sign up for SaaS trials just because your landing page is slick. They don’t discover vendors on TikTok. It’s a follow-the-leader industry where relationships and reputation are everything. Trust is built slowly, and decisions are rarely made alone. When I first joined, I wanted to build the classic modern demand gen engine, Refine Labs-style, with a touch of Dave Gerhardt. But what actually moved the needle? Good ol’ monthly webinars. Partnership press releases. Trade shows. Le sigh. I’ve tested high-volume outbound, ABM, clever SEO plays, LinkedIn thought leadership. And across all of it, the only campaigns that consistently performed were the ones tailored to how this industry builds trust, makes decisions, and buys. What to do instead: Forget the frameworks for a second. Sit down with your team and ask: “What are the 3 ways our buyers actually discover new vendors?” Then double down on just one of them. You don’t need 12 channels. You need one that works, then 10x the effort behind it. Lesson learned: At the end of the day, GTM trends come and go. What never changes is the foundation: you need deep empathy, a real understanding of who you’re selling to, and the humility to meet them where they are, not where your playbook says they should be. --- ## Most companies are adopting AI to check boxes, not solve real problems “We're using AI” is a status update. It is not a strategy, and buyers can tell the difference. Category: AI × GTM · Published: Aug 2025 · Author: Sean Hiss, GTM Strategy Advisor URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/ai-to-check-boxes The AI Elephant in the Room: Breaking Free from Checkbox Implementation to Drive Real Growth AI is transforming GTM operations with predictive lead scoring, personalized content generation, and intelligent account prioritization. The potential is undeniable. But there's an elephant in the room: the pressure to adopt AI tools to check boxes rather than solve real business problems. ### The Checkbox Trap Every board meeting has the implicit question: "What AI tools did you implement?" Teams rush to deploy AI sales coaching platforms nobody uses, content generators producing generic output or people with seven fingers, and prospecting tools automating bad processes. However, recent market research suggests that only about a quarter of GTM leaders see meaningful ROI from AI investments. The gap isn't necessarily in AI's capabilities, but rather it's in implementation strategy. **~25%** — of GTM leaders see meaningful ROI from their AI investments — the gap is implementation, not capability ### The Hidden Implementation Reality AI implementations require first and foremost a “real” business need or opportunity to do something. From there, its data cleanup, workflow redesign, and team enablement. However, when driven by external pressure rather than strategy, teams tend to underestimate these requirements, leading to “check the box” results. ### The Strategic Opportunity Winning companies are going to use AI to create unreplicable capabilities—hyper-personalized account research, predictive stack recommendations, composable software discovery, among any number of other use cases. This requires "AI-smart" thinking: Is there a meaningful business, process or capability gap here and can AI truly create a competitive advantage? ### The Framework for AI Success ### Before any AI implementation, focus on strategic fit: - What specific business outcome will this drive? - Are we enhancing human capabilities or replacing broken processes? - How will we define and measure success beyond adoption metrics? - Do we have the organizational capacity to implement thoughtfully? The most successful AI implementations start with clear problems and measurable goals, then find the right technology to solve them—not the other way around. ### The Real Competitive Advantage AI's transformative potential is real, but it requires strategic and operational discipline to unlock. The teams that resist checkbox pressure and focus on meaningful implementation will build competitive advantage while others chase AI trends. Your investors want to see AI driving differentiated growth, not just operational efficiency. Give them both by being intentional about where and how you deploy this powerful technology. --- ## AI ain't the only answer The best GTM teams reach for AI when it wins, and for a human, a process, or a phone call when those win instead. Category: AI × GTM · Published: Aug 2025 · Author: Jared McGriff, Head of Product Marketing (HyperTrack) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/ai-aint-the-only-answer GTM workflows are inundated with AI tools and automation, but the old school basics are just as important as ever. In this vein, a few key aspects of the GTM process come to mind: - Personalization - True storytelling - CRM hygiene 1:1 messages, sending merch with handwritten notes, phone calls, voicemail, asking for referrals, customer surveys - many of these foundational principles of GTM motion are going to the wayside in the pursuit of scale and efficiency. While personalization can be automated and scaled through AI tools, it is of utmost importance for GTM teams to spend a substantial effort researching top prospects. Spending cycles following news, company posts, and the competitive landscape of prospects should be a priority for all members of the customer facing GTM team. Using this research in initial outreach, follow-up messages, sales decks, and even social posts can be a huge assist in cutting through the noise and clutter of bot-toned messages that we see every day. Nothing can replace talking to customers and getting to the heart of why your solution is a fit for their environment. Understanding specific priorities and business needs is often the result of many conversations across a variety of customers and decision makers. By conducting research with this lens, early-stage GTM teams can create content that resonates and meaningful campaigns that convert. Teams should leverage AI tools where appropriate, but primary research to understand how a product or solution will impact a business is irreplaceable. While AI tools can be instrumental in surfacing relevant contacts and titles within an organization, successfully mapping an account requires an understanding of relationship dynamics between teams and the priorities of executive teams. Matching this intel with content and storytelling that motivates buying decisions is an art and science, a blend of data and a passion for understanding the customer at a visceral level. Detailed documentation of each interaction within the CRM also goes a long way toward communicating a particular prospect's sentiment, role in the purchase decision, and personality preferences that can move the relationship forward. Automation may generate thorough recaps from meetings and calls, but drafting a personal note to add in the human context of these interactions is crucial for the broader team to gather cues as to how a particular customer views the solution being offered or how they might weigh deal-related specifics like implementation time or alternative solutions. These are just a few examples of why AI isn’t always the answer as GTM teams launch new products, refine messaging, and lead customers through the process of making important purchase decisions. While automation and AI will certainly accelerate and augment the GTM process, it is important to remember that buying decisions are made when there is a shared understanding of a problem and solutions, and these fundamentals help GTM teams establish that common ground. --- ## Most GTM teams don't understand the real job of a press release A press release rarely drives pipeline. Used well, it does something more durable. Category: Marketing · Published: Aug 2025 · Author: Sydney Fenkell, Head of Marketing Comms (Proscia) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/real-job-of-a-press-release ### The Contrarian View Let’s get this straight: press releases aren’t just for the press anymore, and they haven’t been for a long time. But too many marketing teams, execs, and even comms pros still treat them like they are. They write for journalists, put them on the wire, hope for a pickup, and move on. That’s outdated thinking and a missed opportunity. Today’s press release is a multi-functional GTM asset that does far more than chase headlines. When written strategically, it can: - Rank in search and appear in AI-generated summaries via your favorite LLM, expanding discoverability in the age of AI - Educate and validate buyers who are doing self-directed research on your company or category - Serve as a timely, high-credibility asset for sales, offering an “excuse to reach out” or a link to drop into a follow-up - Signal traction to prospects, customers, analysts, partners, and investors - Anchor your message in owned channels, giving your narrative longevity and SEO/GEO value long after the initial announcement fades If your press release isn’t designed to show up–in search, in chatbots, in decks—you’re not just behind. You’re invisible. Why I Believe This (And What I’ve Seen Work) I’ve written my fair share of releases, from product launches to strategic partnerships. Early on, success meant media coverage: Did the trades run it? Did it get syndicated? But as buyer behavior evolved, so did our approach. Now, the value of a release lies in how well it reaches and resonates with modern decision-makers—buyers doing their own research, sellers looking for timely proof points, and yes, AI systems scanning for credible sources. Our most recent announcement introduced new survey findings, but we didn’t just “PR the data.” We approached the press release as a discovery asset—structured to signal authority across channels, crafted to tell a story that supports sales conversations, and positioned as a launchpad for downstream demand generation. It wasn’t about buzz. It was about building durable visibility and utility in a world where buyers often find you long before you ever speak to them. And the early signals–as measured by traffic, engagement, and yes, media coverage–suggest the approach is working. ### One Practical Takeaway Tip: Before you publish your next press release, paste it into your LLM of choice and ask: “What would a buyer learn from this?” You’ll quickly see whether it communicates value, credibility, and differentiation—and how ChatGPT makes sense of it. In a world where AI is the new front door, your release needs to resonate with buyers and their algorithms. ### Final words Press releases aren’t dead. They’re just underutilized. In the right hands, they’re one of the most underrated tools in the modern GTM playbook. --- ## Your tech won't scale until you solve the workflow New tools rarely fix a broken process. They just let you run it faster and break sooner. Category: RevOps · Published: Jul 2025 · Author: Jen Tagliaferro, VP Growth & Partnerships (Koda Health) URL: https://www.gtm-circle.com/insights/solve-the-workflow Success in enterprise sales starts with a simple but often-missed truth: you’re not just selling software. The product itself is rarely the most compelling part of your story. All the features in the world won’t matter if the buyer doesn’t see the value—and the real value isn’t in the tech itself. It’s in how it makes life easier for their team, their users, and—especially in healthcare—their patients. A new technology or flashy feature might get you in the door. But real traction comes when you show exactly how it fits into the day-to-day workflow. Your go-to-market (GTM) strategy needs to go beyond aspirational outcomes or polished demos. It must answer a much more grounded question: “Will this create more work for someone, or take work off the table for everyone?” And if you want to answer that credibly, you need to clearly demonstrate how your product fits into what people are already doing. ### In healthcare: Are you integrated into the EMR, or just another system clinicians have to log into? If your solution lives outside the core workflow, how and when does it surface? Who is responsible for using it, and how does it simplify their day? ### In B2B2C models: How do end users (often patients) actually find and use your product? Do they have to download something new? Click a buried link? Rely on referrals? “We’ll engage them digitally” isn’t a strategy—it’s a guess. This is where most GTM teams get stuck. They focus on what the product does rather than how it actually gets used. The result? Misalignment, missed expectations, and stalled implementations. We’ve seen this firsthand at Koda. Our platform delivers real ROI—over $11,000 in savings per patient. But the thing that moves enterprise buyers isn’t the ROI model itself; it’s the workflow clarity. When we walk in with a clear plan for how the product integrates into existing systems, removes friction, and makes someone’s job easier, things move quickly. When we don’t, they stall. **$11K+** — in ROI per patient at Koda — yet workflow clarity, not the ROI model, is what moves enterprise buyers - Future ROI gets you through procurement. - Workflow ROI gets you to scale. - You need both. ### One Tip You Can Use Right Now ### Next time you’re building a sales deck, try this: Start with three slides focused entirely on the people doing the actual work: - Who specifically uses it? - What daily pain does it solve? - How exactly does it fit into their workflow? Buyers don’t care about your roadmap or technical architecture. They care about how this makes their team’s lives easier—and, in healthcare, how it improves patient care. If you can’t clearly articulate this impact, you’re not ready to pitch. Push the product tour and technical details to the appendix. Lead with impact.