2025 GTM Mistakes & What Not To Take Into 2026 (Year-End Recap) with Dale Zwizinski

AI is going to fix everything, right? Like we've seen it in every AI company. Like just pop in our AI and it's going to fix it. But if you don't have the right human in the loop, the right systems, hell, if you don't know what you're trying to fix, everyone jumping on the AI bandwagon and then realizing like it's not what it's all cracked up to be. Like it's so much marketing hype.

My biggest surprise of the year is that we are still encouraging spam cannons. I don't understand how it's December of 25, we're going into 26 and I'm still seeing, "Well, sign up for insert tool here. Personalize it a little bit with insert tool here and send out, you know, 5,000 emails a day." It blows my mind that this is still the way we're doing things.

Welcome to the final episode of the year of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. You only have to deal with Dale who can't keep his desk organized and me for this last episode. This is our annual year-end recap. It is probably the episode I look forward to most every year. We're going to talk a little bit about what is going on in the trenches, what broke, what worked, what's next. We're not going to talk about how everything should be AI, although I'm sure Dale will talk a lot about AI. Last night, my fourteen-year-old told me I was AI. We could dig into that a little bit and what that means. He then told me I was a bot. That was a little frustrating. But let's talk about all things 2025 as we roll into 26. I'm thrilled to have Dale with me here today.

Yes. I look forward to this episode. I like getting into this episode every year because it's kind of funny to look back and recap what's happening and then what we're going to be doing into 2026. So let's rock it.

All right. So we are not going to do a LinkedIn style highlights reel. That's not our style. We're going to unpack what broke, a little bit of what surprised us, and what GTM operators need to carry, and more importantly, leave going into 2026. So Dale, I got the first question for you. I'm curious, what's been your biggest surprise of 2025?

Everyone jumping on the AI bandwagon and then realizing like it's not what it's all cracked up to be. Like it's so much marketing hype and seeing people like retract and recoil like, "Oh now nothing works in AI," and it's like it's just like a reverse of everything that they've been trying to do and figuring it out properly. So I guess it shouldn't have been a big surprise that everything was going to be this big marketing hype and then it was going to just crash. But that's kind of where AI is going to fix everything, right? Like we've seen it in every AI company. Like just pop in our AI and it's going to fix it. But if you don't have the right human in the loop, the right systems, hell, if you don't know what you're trying to fix with AI with a very specific outcome, how are you going to fix it? You've done a lot of work with this this year. What guardrails are you putting in place for our clients so they don't get stuck with what I'll call AI shelter?

I think it's more about the testing and using AI a lot for prototyping to show like what is possible and then the guardrails would really be figuring out how to deploy this if they want to deploy this part of it. I think the other part of the guardrails is looking at AI charters across the organization. So people have just said, "Let's jump into AI and go build this thing." But really, back to what you would normally do with any other process, go to market strategy, execution path. You have to map it out. You have to take the time. You have to look at all the individual components and pieces and then you figure out what parts can actually be built out in AI.

I was just watching a video that I thought was really interesting about people talking about everything being AI agents and we're trying to deploy these AI agents. You're deploying an AI and this group was talking about actually breaking it down to skills. So what are the skills that you can deploy for said agent? So an agent has multiple skills just like a person has multiple skills. And so how do you break down the skills of an individual? We've done a lot of work with that with our groups this year on jobs to be done. And I think this is one of the things that people don't do because they think they know everything that's to be done for a BDR or to be done for an AE. But I know you've done a lot of work with jobs to be done in nine boxing. So what have you learned from that whole experience of building out jobs to be done in nine boxing? Besides, it takes a lot of time and effort.

It takes a lot of time and effort, yes, but garbage in is garbage out. I will tell you the first time I tried to build it and we leveraged AI for almost everything. I would say we're a very AI forward company, but garbage in is garbage out. Like creating a prompt that says, "Okay, I have these six roles and create a nine box for me and tell me who needs to do what job," isn't an effective way to do it. I think the biggest thing that I learned over 25 is the power of the prompt. You have to be very specific. You have to give context. You have to give specific instructions for outputs. I'm by no means an Excel wizard, right? Like I'm decent, but I can now utilize AI to get really complex Excel spreadsheets, comp calculators, et cetera, because I know how to prompt it to get what I want and be very specific. It's the same with jobs to be done in nine boxing. You got to put in the good data to get out the good data.

Yeah. And then actually educating and training the clients how to actually utilize the data or get the right data in the system. Like I know you did a lot of work with some clients on just articulating what are these jobs to be done and how do you have to do them and how everyone's overlapping and stepping on each other, which is actually taking out the revenue growth that they're looking for. So how do we into 2026 almost simplify things to then accelerate our growth?

Yeah. I mean, we're going way off tangent, but I think the easiest way to explain that is everything has to be systematized, right? And I don't think it's something that we've done a great job at. You know, you'll build something, I'll build something, Jake will build something. There's some overlap. It lives in some folder somewhere and like we might all build it different ways. I think to really drive RR growth or client growth, I think to really accelerate in 2026, you have to have the system first. And that starts with the AI charter. If you don't have the system first, you are all going to run around like chickens without your head and nothing is being stitched together.

Yeah.

So I'm going to keep us back on track. We're going to come back to AI. My biggest surprise of the year is that we are still encouraging spam cannons. I don't understand how it's December of 25, we're going into 26 and I'm still seeing, "Well, sign up for insert tool here. Personalize it a little bit with insert tool here and send out, you know, 5,000 emails a day." It blows my mind that this is still the way.

It's funny as you were just talking through that, what went through my head was Mad Libs and it was like, as you're talking, insert here, as you're talking insert here. Insert. You know, this has been not only firing off spam cannons but this is the way go to market has been running for a long period of time. It's like the same thing with just different covers on it or different articulations of it and I do think it's giving sales and marketing a really bad name because people just want the easy button. So how do we come into a place of niching down?

I know some of the clients we have been talking to this year—because investors always talk about TAM and total addressable market and it's like, "Well, just go, fire messages off and you got to do 100 calls a day and you got to do 300 calls an email," everyone.

And so I know one of the things that we've been doing with our clients this year is narrowing down into the SAM, the serviceable addressable market, and the SOM, the serviceable obtainable market. And we were just onboarding a client earlier this month. Are you going to sing your TAM song?

I didn't even know there was one. So that must be one that you sing.

You sing. I mean, you made it up. You sung it on the last meeting.

Um, so you know, and I think what was eye opening to me in that conversation with one of the founders is they did understand TAM because they're doing a lot of investment, but they didn't truly understand SAM or SOM. And so niching down is the new way to drive the amount of revenue. So I'm curious what's the most overused phrase or trend that

# Transcript

You've seen this year?

Oh, for me personally, I'm going to say AISDR. I think so many people have tried it. It has not worked well. It ties into what we were just speaking about. I think it is so overused. We've both traveled to San Francisco this year and I forgot the name of the company, but they have like these very prominent billboards that's like "Replace your people" and go hire an AISDR. I think that goes away in 2026.

I think the trend is these developers building these huge visualizations on YouTube and being like, "Here, click here and I'm going to send it to you and it's going to make you a million dollars. All you have to do is click one button and implement it." Type like GTM strategy execution and I'll send it to you. And then they get like a thousand clicks and all this type of crap. And then it's just a waste of time because you could never implement it into your own organization or system. You could never inject that stuff. I liken it back to when I used to do coding. I would never want to get someone else's code because to debug someone else's code is a complete nightmare. You don't know their thought process, what they're thinking through. So it's the same process just exponentially. Everyone thinks that they're a developer now.

Can't imagine. All right, let's shift gears a little bit. Let's talk about org design. So we saw a lot of go-to-market orgs this year built on vibes or best practices that collapse. There are a lot of successes.

Yeah, correct. So whether it was CROs wearing too many hats, overpromotion without real enablement, RevOps getting caught between strategy and cleanup, where have you seen, whether it be with our clients or just in the broader space that you're talking to, where have you seen org designs get exposed in 2025?

Yeah. Um, right now I'm seeing a lot of customer success orgs getting exposed badly because they didn't have a customer success organization or a client success organization, however they describe it. And then they're trying to build it with people that they already have in house via a PM or someone that doesn't understand revenue. And it's just not one organization. I've seen this happen over multiple organizations and I think it's a little challenging because you need good enablement in place. You need a good training program in place. It's almost like foundational. You know, what is revenue? What do we mean by revenue? And then you're in the middle of a motion and now you're trying to build all sorts of other pieces around it instead of being like, "Okay, let's ask: are they the right people in the right seat at the right time?" Back to the EOS ethos that we talked through.

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So I think that to me, the CS organization is getting exposed the most.

Yeah, I don't disagree. I think CX has been thought of as an afterthought, much more reactive than proactive. Go talk to the customer, but no real focus on revenue or focus on retention. And I say this as someone whose wife leads a CS team. When you have that mindset, what you really have is clerks. You don't have any people that are driving revenue. And CS is absolutely a revenue-producing function. Arguably, it can be just as big of a revenue-producing function and maybe even more important of a revenue-producing function than new sales. I was talking to a colleague yesterday who told me that they want to leave their organization because the suite will not invest in proper CS and everything is so reactive. Their churn is like upwards of nine percent for the year. Brutal, brutal churn numbers. And I think you are seeing revenue leaders get exposed for not knowing. "Oh yeah, I've led CS before." No, you haven't. You have not led real CS before.

What other parts of organizations got exposed?

RevOps. I think too many people for too long have thought RevOps is sales ops. You just need a Salesforce admin or a HubSpot admin and you have a RevOps team. I will tell you, in my opinion, RevOps is the single most important commercial function in an organization. You need a strong RevOps person who could tie together sales, marketing, success, finance. The days of going and finding someone who was a bisops or Salesforce admin person at some big company and now having them lead RevOps is over. I think companies have died because they don't have the right data.

They don't know how to stitch together the data they have.

And there's all this infighting about who owns operations.

RevOps should report to the CEO.

That's a hot take. That's a hot take. So in the motion of revenue operations, let's go right to the next segment: pipeline panic cycle. Like every team that we've talked to this year, the pipeline wasn't there or they're not doing conversions. And then the board gets jumpy, the executives get jumpy and then they react. Right, fire everyone. Then what happens with the go-to-market motion? It gets kind of exposed and now you're jumping back and forth, jumping back and forth, and it kills the whole momentum. And so we have the go-to-market gap: stabilization, foundation, repeatability, scalability. What we've seen is that panic and that jitteriness will push you back into stabilization. You're now questioning the people you have, questioning the processes you have, questioning the technology you're using. All of a sudden you're questioning all this stuff even though you were starting to build momentum on your go-to-market motion.

So what have you seen when it comes to pipeline panic?

It's real in every single company we work with, every single company we talk to, every single person we talk to. I was just doing a training this afternoon and I say this a lot: a big, fat, healthy pipeline solves 90 percent of your problems. What most people don't realize is they're like, "Oh, we need 3x pipeline," because that's the best practice. And I think where the panic comes in is when you have operators like us come in and we actually start running some real numbers. We start looking at real close rates from different stages. We start looking at the data and we're like, "No, you don't need 3x pipeline. You actually need like six and a half x pipeline to get to the numbers you want to get."

Well, the board told me I have to hit $42 million this year.

Well, that's great, but you don't have the pipeline to support it.

Well, then let's just hire more sellers.

Well, no, that doesn't solve your problem either. The biggest thing that I've seen in the panic is when people really start looking at the numbers and really start doing the math, they realize they have not invested as much time, effort, energy, or money in developing the proper pipeline that supports the data of the close rates that you have.

Totally. Could not agree more. Cannot agree more with that. So when you look across our client base, what do you think has driven either reactivating or restarting pipeline this year? Top one or two things that have actually made meaningful moves in the meeting?

I've seen actually in-person meetings, but micro meetings. So having micro conversations or dinners or events that drive value for the attendees, not just people attending them. That's one part of it.

But I want my free steak.

Exactly. But bringing some of that would bring tremendous value to them. And then the second one that I think is a little bit off topic, and we always come back to it, is just picking up the phone and calling people. Like one of our clients, the simplicity of picking up a phone and dialing and just having some conversations with people and not being afraid that you're not going to get a hold of anybody or you're not going to pick anybody up. I think it's just still underrated.

Yeah, I think it's underrated in a lot of ways. I think it's underrated certainly for getting pipeline, but I think whether it's customer success, whether it's internally, whether it's solving a problem, the phone is the most underrated tool we have. We've moved to this era of email and text message and Slack. Like, just pick up the phone and call someone.

All right, let's shift gears. The return of fundamentals. 2025 has been a big year of fundamentals.

The craziest part is the stuff that worked in 2025. I don't think any of it is new, man. It's all the stuff that people have stopped doing. So I'd like to talk about the fundamentals that we've seen fundamentally—see what I did there? Make a difference in driving numbers for 2025.

>> Yeah. Give me a fundamental that's come back.

>> Well, I don't know if it's ever left. I think it's just good discovery, like having good conversations. What we're learning as we educate and enable many sales reps and sales leaders—by the way, essentially sales reps—it's not only asking the first question, but being super curious on why a particular thing is happening. So, you know, why are you having challenges with your whatever and what does that cause both business-wise and emotionally? Yes, tell me more. I know. So it's the single best question you can ask. And I think in discovery, what we need to do to get back to fundamentals is be genuinely curious of your customer. Like we don't get genuinely curious. We just talk because we feel like we should be talking.

>> Yeah. We're all salespeople. We all like our own voice.

>> I think, you know, great discovery is certainly one of them. Problem-led messaging, um, focusing on the problem that you could solve. If you are not a painkiller and you're a vitamin, you are not going to be purchased. You have to show your prospects and your customers that you deeply know them. You understand the problem, and that is what you are leading with. No more. Like, you can't. This has to stop. I get them every day. Hi, Adam. I see that you're the CEO at Revenue Reimagined, and because of that, you must struggle. No. Like, that's garbage. There are so many signals out there, so many things you could research on LinkedIn. There are so many things you could do to really understand what's going on from a problem perspective that if you're not leading with the problem, you're just not going to move that.

>> As we move into 2026, no crystal balls, just patterns—we're not going to be Nostradamus here. What are some of the trends or things to look out for in 2026? Let's start with go-to-market org structures. Like, what do you think? I think CS is going to continue to grow exponentially. And there's going to be a continued power shift from top of funnel to post-sale. That's the way I feel and that's what I'm seeing. Curious what your thoughts are.

>> Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think you're going to see tools die. I think you're going to see a lot of—

>> Come on, name a couple tools that are going to die. Come on.

>> Nope. Not going to do that. I think you're going to see a good amount of consolidation. I think, you know, areas where we have two, three, four, five tools, those are going to change and you're going to get down to one or two.

>> I totally agree with that. I actually think people will—the people that are educating themselves on what the AI is, what technologies, how you're going to run it, I think all of those things will help us. And going back to basic design mode will help us. So I couldn't agree more.

Um, here's a leadership trait that I think will get you hired next year and one that I think will get you fired next year. I think one leadership trait that's going to get you hired next year is having that skill of understanding what LLMs are doing, how to implement them in a process. So jobs to be done, skills, execution on skills, breaking those apart and figuring out what humans should be doing and what machine should be doing and how we blend those together. I think that is the number one skill that will get you hired. And I think the number one skill that will get you fired is just prompt engineering.

>> I like that. I will go one further. If you as a leader, if you are not or cannot be an AI expert, you are not going to succeed in 2026.

>> All right, quick rapid fire, and then we'll wrap it up. What is the one tool you'll bet on for 2026, Dale?

>> Google AI Studio.

>> Spicy take. That's not one that comes up a lot. What's the one tool you'll ditch?

>> One tool I will ditch. I don't know. I don't have one right now that I would ditch, because I think I'm trying a bunch of them.

>> I don't have one at this moment. How about you? Which, what's one tool you'll bet on?

>> Tool that I will bet on—and it can't be one that I've mentioned so far that we're big fans of. That's a good one. I'm still very, very bullish on the native LLMs. I've actually shifted my opinion. I'm all in on Gemini right now. I think Gemini is going to win the race. I think the Google infrastructure is like super spot-on. I do think I'm seeing from Gemini, Google AI Studio, Anti-Gravity, which is their IDE platform, and then deploying from there. So I agree with you.

>> Yep. And the one that I would ditch is any of these—we'll call them sequencers. And we'll just end it there. On that note, it has been a really exciting 2025. I am excited for 2026. We have some incredible guests lined up for next year starting in January. Some you've heard of, some you haven't. And yes, you will still get to put up with Dale and myself. Have a wonderful, happy year, y'all.

>> Have a great year.