Hey {{first_name}} ,

Growth stalls. A quarter comes in soft, then another. Leadership convenes, and within about ten minutes somebody says the sentence that ends most of these conversations before they properly begin: we need better people.

This issue is about why that sentence is usually wrong, and what it costs.

Sreedhar Peddineni,
CEO, GTM Buddy

Sixth spotlight in the Wednesday Women × GTM Buddy Revenue Activators series

The talent diagnosis arrives fast because it is available, it is actionable, and it does not require anyone in the room to examine anything they built.

Stacy Fox has spent a career watching it be wrong.

She has built and scaled go-to-market teams across stages, and her position is direct: if revenue isn't predictable, the system is broken, not the people. Most revenue problems, she argues, get misdiagnosed as hiring problems, when the real opportunity is fixing the system to unlock capacity.

Her version of the mechanism is worth reading slowly.

Great people matter. Obviously. But they can only succeed inside systems that let them. When the ideal customer profile is unclear, when product marketing and sales and process aren't aligned, when data isn't embedded in how decisions actually get made, even high performers struggle. Not because they lack ability. Because they spend their days working around friction instead of scaling what works.

What looks like a talent gap is a system gap in disguise.

The inverse is the part that matters commercially. Fix the system and you don't merely lift performance. You unlock people who were already there and previously underutilised. Success becomes repeatable rather than heroic.

Read that with a budget lens on. Every organisation running the talent diagnosis is proposing to buy capacity by adding headcount. Stacy is describing capacity that already exists inside the team, currently being spent on friction.

Same number, two routes. One needs a hiring plan and two quarters of ramp. The other doesn't.

Her summary of where organisations go wrong: they over-invest in hiring and under-invest in design.

The reason this reads as conviction rather than positioning is that Stacy didn't arrive at it through revenue theory. She arrived through physician offices.

Her foundation was built inside them, understanding the daily reality of the people she'd later sell to, long before she led commercial teams. She worked up from supporting providers in their workflows, into sales, into leading and scaling teams, and eventually into owning full revenue and growth.

That sequence produces a specific view of data, and it's the second thing she champions: data should show up in the moments that matter. Inside a deal. In a rep's next step. In a leadership decision. Not after the fact, in a dashboard.

Anyone who has watched clinicians work will recognise where that comes from. Information arriving after the appointment isn't information, it's a record. The value of knowing something is bounded by whether you knew it in time to act.

Which is the whole argument for in-flow delivery, made by someone who learned it in a waiting room rather than in a category deck.

What she'd tell someone starting out
Don't chase titles, chase exposure. If you want to do more, start doing the work before it's officially yours. Build the process. Create the playbook. Improve the workflow. You don't get noticed by asking for more - you get noticed by creating more value than your role requires. And don't be afraid to be wrong in public; the people who grow fastest stay uncomfortable long enough to get good at things that matter.

Her why
It started before the career. Her youngest brother has Down syndrome, and she grew up watching her parents navigate a system that was complex, fragmented and often overwhelming. That gave her an early, personal understanding of how much better it could be - which pulled her into healthcare and still drives her. As a mother of girls, it has expanded: she wants them to see work ethic, resilience, and that they can build whatever path they choose.

There's a through-line in that, and it isn't subtle. Someone who watched a family absorb the cost of a badly designed system doesn't later mistake a design problem for a people problem. She has seen who pays when the two get confused.

Stacy's POV on what enablement isn't

Follow Stacy
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On 18 August, Seismic completed its merger with Highspot. Combined, 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users. The part worth your attention isn't the deal, it's that the company stopped describing itself as a sales enablement company. It now positions around go-to-market performance, defined in its own announcement as how effectively organisations turn strategy into revenue.

If you're one of those customers, nothing in your contract changed. Something else did.

You approved a line item for a functional job. Sellers couldn't find or use what the company knew. You owned it. It sat in your budget. Everything corresponded.

Now the promise spans sales, marketing, customer success and revenue operations, and the owner is still you, and the budget is still Enablement.

That gap doesn't stay theoretical. It shows up in planning:

CFO: What are we renewing? You: Our go-to-market performance platform.
CFO: Why is go-to-market performance coming out of the enablement budget?

And the harder one:

CRO: If it's our go-to-market performance platform, what number does it own? You: Pipeline, partly. CRO: Win rate? You: It influences it. CRO: Revenue? You: Eventually. CRO: Then what am I buying?

That's not a vendor failing. It's what happens when a promise is pitched at the level of an aggregate. Nobody can own an aggregate.

The honest other reading:
This might be an upgrade. If you've spent three years arguing that your function deserves a revenue-level conversation, a vendor moving up-category hands you larger language and an executive audience. Whether it's an upgrade or an authorisation problem depends on one thing: whether the owner and the budget move with the promise. If your CRO agrees the function now owns a revenue number and the budget is restructured to match, correspondence is restored at a higher level and everyone is better off. If not, you've inherited accountability for an outcome nobody scoped to you.

The test worth applying - to any vendor, including the one you're reading. Does the category come with a unit? Not a promise, not an outcome. Something countable, attributable to a specific function, and small enough that one person can be held to moving it.

Categories that lasted all had one. Customer Success had net revenue retention. Marketing automation had cost per qualified lead. Categories that didn't last - Sales 2.0, social selling, growth hacking, each described something real and none survived a budget cycle, because when the CFO asked what the line item was accountable for, the answer was a philosophy.

What to do about it:
Not much, urgently. Budget architecture moves on planning cycles, not on merger dates. But before your next renewal, write down three things: why you bought it, what the vendor now says it does, and what you actually need solved next year. If those still overlap, renew and stop worrying. If they've diverged, you don't have a switching decision - you have a correspondence problem, and it's better named in planning than discovered in a CRO's office.

Stacy's argument only becomes useful if you can act on it. Here's the version that fits in ninety minutes.

Who's in the room
You, one frontline manager, and two reps, your strongest and one squarely at median. Not two strong ones. The gap between them is the entire point.

When to use it
Before any intervention you'll later need to defend. Not after.

Why it matters
Independent assessment of 104 enablement functions found that around four in five cannot connect their work to recognised revenue in any measured way. Only about one in twenty can say it without qualification. That isn't a competence problem. It's a sequencing problem: the measurement had to exist before the change, and it didn't.

The anatomy of one that holds.

A single number, not a dashboard. If you can't say it in one sentence, it won't survive the meeting where it matters.

Agreed with the person who'll later judge it. A baseline you set alone is a number you'll be arguing about later. Get the CRO or CFO to say "yes, that's the measure" before you start. The agreement is the artefact, not the number.

Attributable to your function. If the number moves for six reasons and you control one, it isn't your baseline. Find the narrower thing you actually own.

Dated and recorded somewhere neither of you can edit. Sounds cynical. Isn't. Memory reconstructs baselines favourably in both directions.

Paired with a stated timeframe. "Within two quarters" is a commitment. "Over time" is a hedge that reads as one.

How it fails
The most common failure isn't a wrong number - it's a number nobody agreed to. Second most common is a baseline set on an aggregate that a dozen things move, which makes attribution impossible and hands anyone sceptical an easy dismissal.

The uncomfortable version
If you're twelve months into a transformation with no baseline, you have improvements you believe in and cannot prove. That's a very common position and it isn't a personal failing. It's what happens when the diagnosis step gets skipped, because no vendor sells it - it isn't a feature and it can't be procured.

Your conversation intelligence tool already holds the evidence for the workflow above. Most teams only ever ask it about the buyer.

Run this against a batch of 20-30 recent calls from one team.

Review these call transcripts from a single sales team. I'm not looking for buyer sentiment or deal risk.

I'm looking for evidence of seller friction - moments where the rep didn't have what they needed at the moment they needed it.

For each instance, give me: the topic, the rep's approximate wording, and whether the same topic appears in other calls.

Then rank the topics by how often they recur across the batch. Do not suggest fixes.

What looks like a talent gap is often a system gap in disguise.

If growth has stalled and the hiring conversation has already started, spend one meeting on the other diagnosis before the req goes out. Not because hiring is wrong sometimes, it's exactly right but because the two options have wildly different costs and only one of them usually gets examined.

Ask what your best rep does that your median rep doesn't, then ask why that difference persists. If the answer is talent, hire. If the answer is that your median rep is working around something the system should handle, you've found capacity you already own.

Thanks to Stacy for this one
You can find her on LinkedIn, writing about revenue as a system and about data that shows up in time to be useful, which, having read this, you'll recognise as the same argument twice.

Next issue: Stephanie Benavidez on building functions from a blank page.

When growth stalls, the fastest diagnosis is usually a people problem. The more useful diagnosis is often harder: finding where the system is consuming capacity the team already has. We tried to make this issue as operationally honest as possible, the hiring instinct is understandable, the hidden friction is measurable, and the capacity audit above is the version you can run before another requisition goes out.

Reply and tell me what landed and what missed. Specifically: if you run the capacity audit, tell me which recurring wait or hunt surprised you most and what your strongest rep had quietly built to avoid it. That gap between your strongest and median rep is often the clearest signal of where Revenue Activation should begin.

Three things you can do right now: