Your tech stack should give you superpowers.
Over the past 18 months, I got exposed to the world of developer tools. As I grew my engineering skills, I became increasingly frustrated with the state of the tools in my GTM stack. In late May, I settled on a non-negotiable rule for any new tech I took on: your tech stack should give you superpowers.
I first experienced GTM superpowers when I was a BDR and got access to Salesloft. Transitioning from mail merging to sequences was game-changing; with a little grit and automation, I was able to source over 50% of the pipeline on my small team.
The first wave of SEPs got as much right as they got wrong. Sequences, automation, and reporting quickly became a hybrid of art and science. However, as they grew, the big two (Salesloft and Outreach) abandoned their core users and began expanding their product suite horizontally to chase the needs of sales reps. They got distracted chasing Gong, and in doing so completely missed the boat on the parallel dialer revolution.
Nonetheless, those early days with an SEP were revolutionary. I literally wouldn’t shut up about Salesloft and made it my mission to increase our team’s adoption. My zeal got me noticed, and I quickly found a new role doing ops and enablement for our global BDR team.
Clay was the next leap, not because of the workflows and automations, but because of the data. The concept of a single source for all the business data I needed was a revelation. Again I couldn’t stop talking about it. And again, it changed my career trajectory, opening my eyes to the burgeoning GTM Engineering movement, pushing me to break out of the traditional ops world and embrace building with AI.
I’m sure some would argue the superpower of our current time is LLMs or agents. Yes, these give individuals the power to do amazing things, but the power of an LLM is table stakes at this point.
I see the superpower du jour as the interface between the data layer, the action layer, and our agents.
That can take the form of a straight-forward MCP server, a well-documented API, a CLI that just works or an SDK that’s easy to build with. The companies providing these agent-native interfaces are the ones best positioned to win the hearts of today’s builders.
I fear some of the big players in our industry are missing this insight. Legacy providers like Outreach and Gong charge for MCP access. Outreach has a specific SKU, and Gong charges credits. Charging for access or charging for usage makes no sense (especially if you bill per-seat). Companies that adopt this strategy of penalizing usage will stall their own growth and stickiness in an account. For me, these are churn-worthy actions.
Other vendors are adapting to the new world: Zoominfo has GTM.ai, Clay is pivoting to their increasingly powerful CLI, Common Room is investing in exposing their signals through an MCP for reps, and Nooks lets you manage sequences from Claude.
The GTM tools I’m building around feel more like the developer platforms I use than the GTM software I grew up using: They offer well-documented APIs, MCP auth for humans and agents, with nearly every primitive and function exposed for consumption and building. When I build with tools like Amplemarket or Attention, I never wonder if a feature I want to use has an endpoint on the API; I just tell my agents to build and assume it’s possible.
At the end of the day, the tools that “just work” with agents are the ones I reach for on a daily basis. They’re enabling a whole new paradigm of GTM (more on this next week).