u/BigDLincoln

talked to someone in revops recently who said they had 12 tools across their gtm stack and nobody could explain what 4 or 5 of them were doing anymore.

i thought that was an edge case but the more i ask around the more it sounds like the norm.

the funny part is the tools don't get removed. they just stay on, paid, running, and everyone assumes someone else knows what they're for. the person who bought it left. the workflow it was built around changed. but the invoice keeps getting approved.

i've started doing quarterly "what is this actually doing" audits and it's uncomfortable every time.

does your team have a real process for retiring tools, or does the stack just keep growing until someone panics at budget review??

I interviewed for a Security Engineer role after multiple conversations with the recruiter about compensation.

I was aiming for around $185k, and while they couldn't guarantee that number, they repeatedly told me I was interviewing for a level where that range was very realistic. After 6 interview rounds and weeks of prep, the offer came back at $128k and also for a lower level position than the one I had been interviewing for.

The comp was below what I currently make, so I explained that taking a pay cut just didn't make sense for where I am in my career. Then the recruiter stepped closer to me and told me this was the best decision I could make for my future, and even said I'd probably never get another opportunity like this from another company. It felt very weird at the time.

I ended up declining the offer because I was very frustrated. I had invested so much time into the interview process expecting an offer much higher than what I was already making.

Is this becoming normal at big tech companies lately? (This is definitely wrong, btw)

Also, was the recruiter right? Making 135k/year as of right now but at a much smaller company than Meta.

my two are 2 and 4, mornings are kinda easy, breakfast and some tv while I get sorted, but after that it's just hours, and if they're not doing something they end up fighting over toys or my 4 year old winds up the little one on purpose.

What's worked so far is rotating toy bins, a messy activity box with pom poms and paper plates for the 4 year old, stacking cups for the 2 year old, and putting music on for a dance break when they get restless. still missing ideas though, especially for the toddler who can't do craft the way her brother can.

for parents with kids close in age how do you keep them engaged throughout the day to keep them active?

ok so this week basically every GTM tool i pay for quietly changed the word on their homepage to "agentic." same product. new noun. Outreach rebranded to an "agentic AI platform," Salesforce shipped a lineup of buyer and shopper and merchant agents, Salesloft killed Drift for an agent thing, and Apollo and Clay jammed themselves into ChatGPT and Claude while ZoomInfo cozied up to Perplexity, so their data lives inside the assistant now. cool. genuinely some of it's real.

here's the part nobody wants on the slide though: nearly 8 in 10 companies report zero meaningful bottom-line gain from AI so far. eight. in ten. and get this, 76% of revenue leaders admit they're adopting AI faster than their operating model can actually support. read that again. three quarters of us are buying agents to run a system that isn't structurally capable of running them. it's like buying a self-driving car for a town with no roads and then filming a testimonial about how the car keeps hitting trees.

and i say all this as someone who got humbled personally this quarter. we bolted an "agent" onto our outbound expecting it to think. what it actually did was execute our existing motion, which was mid, just faster and with more confidence. we didn't automate intelligence. we automated our own bad assumptions and gave them a login. turns out an agent pointed at a broken process isn't a revolution, it's just the same mess at scale wearing a little robot hat.

the thing the "agentic" homepages skip is buried in the same reports: the number one predictor of these tools failing is scattered, disconnected data. the plumbing. the boring stuff nobody rebrands. an agent can only be as smart as the system it plugs into, and most of our systems are five tools that don't talk, a CRM full of ghosts, and a definition of "qualified" that changes depending on who's presenting. you can't agent your way out of that. the agent just discovers the chaos faster than you did.

so my genuinely-not-cynical take for july: the winners this year aren't the teams with the most agents. they're the unsexy teams who fixed their data and their definitions FIRST, so when they finally point an agent at it, there's something coherent to act on. everyone else just bought a very expensive way to be wrong in real time.

anyway. did your company rebrand something to "agentic" this month without changing what it does? and be honest, is your agent actually thinking or is it just your old process in a robot hat? i need to know i'm not alone out here.

every settlement notice i've ever gotten landed straight in spam, and i wonder if that is actually an accident or a strategy?

do they want less people to claim it or a complete different reason?

quick PSA for anyone buying enrichment based on the match rate on the pricing page. that number is marketing, not deliverability, and confusing the two is how teams nuke their own sending reputation.

here's the thing nobody tells you: match rate just means the tool returned SOMETHING for a contact. it does NOT mean the email works. a provider can "match" 95% of your list and have 20% of those emails bounce. and a 90% match with a 15% bounce rate is genuinely worse than an 80% match with a 2% bounce rate, because bounces don't just waste sends, they tank your domain and quietly send your GOOD emails to spam too.

meanwhile your data is rotting while you read this. B2B contact data decays ~2.1% a month, that's ~22.5% a year. so the list you "verified" in january? a quarter of it is fiction by december. that VP you enriched became a CRO somewhere else and their old email is a landmine sitting in your sequence.

and the "just buy ZoomInfo/Apollo/one big tool" move has a ceiling nobody mentions, single provider matches 55-70% of a list max. no one database has everyone. the other 30-45% comes back blank or wrong, which is the whole reason waterfall (stack providers, fall through until one hits, THEN verify) exists, it pushes match to 85%+.

the actual playbook is boring and nobody does it: match rate is vanity, deliverability is sanity. verify as the LAST step, every time, no exceptions. re-enrich quarterly minimum because the data's decaying whether you look or not. a blank field is honest, a confidently wrong direct dial sends your rep to a stranger.

anyway go check your last campaign's bounce rate against your provider's "accuracy" claim. the gap is the lie. what's yours?

the platform does exactly what it promises. account intelligence, the only B2B-native DSP in the market, AI agents launched last year for buying group identification and engagement sequencing. they're paying mid-six-figures and the data layer is legitimately useful.

here's the uncomfortable part. when their CRO walked through the last four quarters of closed won deals, he couldn't point to a single one where Demandbase changed the outcome. the in-market accounts the platform flagged were mostly accounts sales already knew about. the intent signals confirmed what reps already suspected. the platform made everyone feel more sophisticated without anyone being able to isolate incremental pipeline.

that's not a Demandbase problem specifically. it's the question every team running a six-figure ABM platform should be asking and almost nobody is. if you stripped the platform out tomorrow, what would actually change in your pipeline?

for anyone running Demandbase at full deployment, can you actually tie incremental deals back to it, or is it expensive validation of decisions your team was already making?