The Inclined | 28 August 2026
Scaling B2B Success Through Proven Strategies
In this issue...
🎯 Growth Strategy Spotlight
📊 Revenue Intelligence Report
🚀 B2B Success Story
🛠️ Growth Tools & Resources
🎯 Growth Strategy Spotlight
Your first meetings are where the pipeline actually leaks
You booked the meeting. Your rep knew the deck cold. Forty minutes later: “this is really helpful, let us circle back internally.” Nothing in your CRM records a loss. That is the problem.
The most expensive meeting your company runs is the one that ends politely.
Buying more meetings just scales the leak. Matt Oess, founder and CEO of Revenue Growth Agent, put it plainly on 17 August: companies that answer a weak pipeline by buying more meetings “may simply be paying to scale poor sales execution.” The maths is unforgiving. $100,000 buys 50 meetings. At 10% conversion, that is five opportunities at $20,000 each. At 20%, it is $10,000 each. Same spend, same headcount, different forty minutes.
The job of a first meeting changed. Most call structures did not. Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers. 45% used generative AI for a recent purchase, drawing on 7 information sources. Sixty-seven percent would prefer a rep-free process. Yet 69% still turn to a rep to validate what the AI told them. Buyers no longer arrive to be informed. They arrive half-convinced, holding a shortlist and a stack of untested assumptions. A rep who opens by explaining the category is answering last week’s question.
The leak shows up in the next step. Flowla analyzed more than 30,000 deal rooms and found that roughly 48% drew zero engagement, with an average of 7 days passing before a room was first opened. That is the signature of “we’ll circle back”: a next step that lives in your system and nowhere in the buyer’s calendar. RAIN Group’s 2026 research agrees: 79% of leaders report no-decision losses are flat or rising, citing unquantified business impact, an unconfirmed decision process, and no economic buyer in the room.
None of this is a lead quality problem, which is the diagnosis most boards reach for first. It is an execution problem hiding inside a healthy-looking activity number.
Three things to implement this week:
Split your meeting metric in two. Report first-meeting-to-qualified-opportunity conversion next to meeting volume. One number tells you demand is working; the other tells you the room is.
Pre-educate before the call, not during it. Send every booked prospect a readiness checklist or ROI calculator so the first 20 minutes go to their business case rather than your category.
Ban the soft close. No meeting ends without a named date, a named attendee, and a named decision it moves. “Circle back” is not a next step; it is a polite exit.
📊 Revenue Intelligence Report
What moved the market this week.
🔍 Integrate buys CaliberMind to close the loop between spend and revenue - Link
The B2B lead management platform acquired the GTM intelligence and attribution vendor, folding campaign execution and revenue analytics into one closed loop. Terms were not disclosed.
💡 CEO Takeaway: Check whether your attribution tells you which channels created pipeline, not merely which touched it. If that answer takes a spreadsheet and a fortnight, fix measurement before approving more spend.
💰 EULER raises $4.3 million for agentic partner relationship management - Link
The San Diego company uses AI agents to automate partner onboarding, enablement, deal registration and attribution. Channel Equity Partners led the seed, with customers including BambooHR, Zip and BigCommerce.
💡 CEO Takeaway: If partners already source deals for you, cost that channel properly. Compare partner-sourced pipeline against direct outbound on cost per qualified opportunity before your next AE hire.
💰 Ringg raises $10 million as voice agents move into outbound calling - Link
Peak XV Partners led the extended Series A for the enterprise voice agent company, whose agents run outbound calling, lead qualification and collections. Ringg processes around 20 million call attempts a month.
💡 CEO Takeaway: Model cost per qualified conversation for an AI voice agent against your SDR team before the next hiring round. Test it on one low-stakes segment first, never your best accounts.
📊 YouTube public view counts jump about 30% from 24 August - Link
Agentio modeled 35,800 creator videos and found public view counts will run roughly 30% above engaged views under YouTube’s new counting method. Technology content shows the largest modeled lift at 36.5%.
💡 CEO Takeaway: Rebaseline your YouTube reporting now, before a flattering jump lands in a board deck. Treat engaged views as the real number and footnote the methodology change this quarter.
🚀 B2B Success Story
Start your AI rollout with five people, not five thousand
Tom Gersic ran Lightning adoption at Salesforce as a board-level program, reporting to Marc Benioff, then spent two years rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise to major banks and insurers as OpenAI’s first implementation partner. He founded YouEx.ai in February.
Count humans, not logos: The original target was customers on Lightning, a binary that hid the truth, because half an organization could still be sitting in Classic. Tom’s team moved the North Star to monthly active users, and the whole program changed shape: “We had targets that we kinda missed the first year and just barely made the second year and then crushed the third year.” Without the right target, he says, you are “driving a car blind”. If you report seats to your board, you are reporting the wrong number.
Make access a scarce commodity: Switching a tool on for 1,000 people and wishing them luck is, in Tom’s words, “a recipe for disaster”. Start with five champions who will give you hard feedback because they actually love the thing, then let demand build: “Can my friend sign up?” Scarcity does the internal selling that your all-hands announcement never will.
Full episode at Predictable B2B Success with Tom Gersic, and more from him at tomgersic.com.
🛠️ Growth Tools & Resources
📧 Educational email courses that convert
Buyers educate themselves long before your first meeting, and they arrive with half-formed criteria they cannot articulate. A short email course does that work for them: the problem, the terminology, the risks, the questions worth asking. The meeting then starts at evaluation instead of explanation. Book a call to map yours.
🎯 Recommended tool: Attention
Attention sits across your calls, emails, and CRM and then acts, drafting the follow-up, updating the records, and running the next play, rather than only recording and summarising. That matters here, because the follow-up goes out while the conversation is still warm. Certificial cut its forecasting error margin to 5% with it, and Unify reports a 40% higher win rate. The company raised a $30M Series B in June 2026 and suits teams with more than a handful of reps.
🎙️ Podcast spotlight
AI adoption: 54% of workers bypass the tools you bought
Guest: Tom Gersic, Founder, YouEx.ai
Gersic spent twelve years at Salesforce, where he ran Lightning adoption as a board-level program. His argument is blunt: seats sold is a vanity number, and monthly active users is the figure worth taking to a board. Worth reading next to it: go-to-market teams account for close to 30% of personal-account AI use and only about 10% of enterprise licensed use.
Listen to the full episode here.
That’s it for this week. Keep scaling predictably!
Cheers,
Vinay (@vinaykoshy)
Host, Predictable B2B Success Podcast | Founder, Sproutworth
Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Always conduct your own research before implementing strategies discussed.
Vinay,
Thanks for picking up our press release, and including Revenue Growth Agent in your article. Thanks for what you do!
Matt