# Unsolicited advice for the next GTM leaders In the past week I've seen some of the coldest, milquetoast takes on record out of the LinkedIn-famous prognosticators, ranging from "fractional workers are out of touch" to "we fired all of our copywriters and replaced them with AI agents—better and faster!" I generally don't give much attention to anyone whose primary occupation is rage baiting the masses with pseudo-intellectual "thought leadership," but in aggregate, these posts are beginning to do more than touch a nerve. Since I've found myself giving the same advice more than once recently, I decided it's time to write it down. Over the last few months on sabbatical and taking contracts through [[Greenhaus]], I've had *a lot* of conversations with industry peers and founders. Across those conversations there is a persistent feeling of uncertainty and trepidation. There are very real, macro-economic and societal trends underpinning this uncertainty. But when I dig deeper in those conversations, the real source of anxiety is almost always the conflicting, thoughtless, and generally under-baked commentary coming out of "industry leaders." Here's some anti-thought leadership to balance the scales. ## Getting the bag My advice starts here: despite the corporate trappings, LinkedIn is as much a part of the nihilstic ["bag culture"](https://defector.com/the-hawk-tuah-memecoin-rug-pull-is-the-apotheosis-of-bag-culture) as any. More than that, it might be the most insidious of all the medias in the way "thought leadership" attempts to obfuscate the essential nature of posting Content. The point is very rarely to enrich you, and almost always to add the velocity of your attention to someone else's promotional flywheel. A reminder that: >[!quote] ![[The Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is the Apotheosis of Bag Culture - Clips#^aa9a3c]] This leads me to a second, maybe more important point: this anxiety creates a self-sustaining negative feedback loop. The more anxious you are, the more you seek answers externally. The more conflicting that advice, the more anxious you become. All of this prevents you from doing the thing most likely to unstick you—the work. Thought leadership traffics in absolutes and answers, but you know better. There are no silver bullets, just questions, opportunities, and effort. Now before you say, "wait Adam, you're posting thought leadership right now" let's be real—for better or for worse, this is the system we've made for ourselves. You have to be able to live in the system and critique the system. I didn't come here to shit on people who love LinkedIn, I came here to remind you that in this timeline, everyone has an angle. I've made some great connections here, and I've learned a ton from those connections. But I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt I didn't learn those things scrolling a feed, it was in the conversations and the work that followed. I cannot stress this enough: the people who are writing the next chapter of success *are not* glued to the feed and posting every day, they're out there doing the work. ## Dispelling some doozies Philosophical commentary aside, there are a few of the thought leader campaigns being bandied around right now that I find particularly damaging, and could use a little tempering. ### AI will eat career progression One thought leader posted this week about "the end of knowledge management." Ostensibly, they're hearing from their portfolio of companies that nobody will hire CMOs/CROs/VPs because this work has been adequately replaced by GenerativeAI. They go on to advise marketers and sellers to abandon traditional career progression en masse and instead become individual contributors. Like all good speculative fiction, there are enough kernels of truth in this feedback to paint a plausible narrative. But that's all it is, speculative fiction. Here's what we do know: - We know that macro-economic conditions have [[the future of saas|changed the investment thesis for SaaS companies]]. - We know that AI is actively and [[what remains human|fundamentally changing the nature of knowledge work]]. We can hypothesize many possibilities in the space where these two ideas intersect, but at the end of the day, all we really know is that the primary drivers of how teams organize and spend growth capital are changing. Regardless of how you feel about artificial intelligence, that technology is here now—if you are or aspire to be a revenue leader then recognize that it's on all of us to make it worthwhile. None of that means you can't be a CMO, but it does me that what it means to be a CMO will look different, and the smart money is on adapting now. ### AI will replace knowledge workers Relatedly, another thought leader this week posted about OpenAI's demo of a vertical sales agent, which they confidently say heralds the end of all SDR and AE jobs. I've seen the same said of production designers, producers, copywriters, or just about any other job in knowledge work. This is a compelling argument for many because it's doomy enough to give us permission to be nihilistic about the future. The bigger and more complex these sociological, technological, and ecological phenomena become, the more unfathomable they become. At a certain point it's easier to wring our hands and stare off into the middle distance looking for *The Singluarity.* But we don't have a damn clue what's going to happen. All we know is that for the first time, sellers, marketers and creators are grappling with the essential reframing of their work as ["engineering problems"](https://www.readamplified.com/sales-prospecting-is-becoming-an-engineering-problem) rather than the specialized or creative challenges they have been historically. Good engineers don't automatically build great products, and it's similarly impossible that simply having good go-to-market engineering will guarantee growth for organizations. As long as humans are making buying decisions, there will always be a role for original, creative thought and authentic, genuine human connection. ### Fractional playbooks are behind the curve I've seen several well-known talking heads recently bemoan how "far out of touch" fractional executives and IC's have become, going on to say that these individuals are foisting dead playbooks on organizations and any engagement with them is doomed to fail. Aside from the obvious head-scratcher (that somehow consultants and outsiders, untethered from the baggage and inertia of in-house politics, would somehow be inherently more out of touch than FTEs?) the timing of this thought leadership is especially puzzling. At the time of writing, the January 2025 jobs report just posted, showing slower than expected jobs growth but easing unemployment rates. At the same time, the average American's [job search is taking more than 6 months](https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/job-searches-lasting-6-months-6318092/), with a whopping 22% of survey respondents saying it's taking MORE than a year to find a job. ![[How long does it take to land a job.png]] Simultaneously, we're seeing [reports from founders](https://www.highalpha.com/2024-saas-benchmarks-report) and business leaders that "Go-To-Market Execution" is their primary concern, while popular career sites are advising candidates to "[come with proven playbooks](https://www.huntclub.com/blog/now-hiring-executives-must-love-driving-change-come-with-proven-playbooks?__readwiseLocation=)" (that don't exist yet) if they want a shot at being hired. ![[What's keeping founders up at night.png]] The shift to efficient growth has pressured business leaders to downsize, especially in headcount and growth capital spend, and there are a lot of talented people caught in that crossfire. Freelance or fractional work is not for everyone or every organization. But to confidently suggest that "fractional work is dead" at a watershed moment in which we have a surplus of motivated talent, a clear and present need for GTM execution AND opportunities to develop new, innovative playbooks? Frankly, that's the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. It's at best, woefully uninformed, and at worst, an attempt to undercut much-needed lifeboats for people trying to find their way in this new paradigm. For what? ### What comes next It's an uncertain time. I've said many times in the past few months, anyone who speaks with certainty about what comes next is a charlatan. It's down to each of us to meet the moment in the best way that we can, and that's a deeply personal choice. I still believe that one of the greatest privileges we have is to choose how we spend our labor. If I can summarize or encapsulate the advice I hoped to codify today for you to takeaway it would be this: we get to build the future we want to see, but we have to build it. Your time and attention is too precious a commodity to be wasted on nihilism and despair manufactured by a few people to enrich themselves.