elicamner

of course, DM me if you want to talk more!

Spent six years on the GTM side at Toast (through IPO) and have lived in this exact problem, so a few takes: The biggest miss I see is treating pre-call prep and post-call analysis as two separate things owned by two separate tools. They're really one loop - post-call insight only matters if it actually changes what the rep does before the next call. Most orgs never close that loop, so you end up with a graveyard of recorded calls and scorecards nobody acts on. The bottleneck is almost never data anymore; it's manager time to turn that data into something a rep can do differently on Monday. On in-call assistance for SDRs/newer reps - I think it's genuinely useful for ramp and for high-volume, more scripted motions (cold outbound, qualification). It shortens the deer-in-headlights moment and gets people to competent faster. But two real risks: 1. Crutch effect. If a rep is reading next-best-action off a screen, they're not building the listening muscle that actually makes them good. You get competent-faster but plateau-sooner. 2. Cognitive overload. Mid-conversation a nervous SDR can only process so much - live prompts can make them a worse listener, not a better one. My honest bias: in-call assist gets you to "competent." The human coaching loop - post-call patterns feeding targeted prep and 1:1s - is the only thing I've seen reliably get reps to "good," especially early when the habits stick. In-call is the band-aid; coaching is the cure. I'd invest there first. Curious what others are seeing on adoption though - feels like a lot of teams buy the in-call tooling and then struggle to get reps to trust it live.

The way I've seen this play out: it's almost never a signal gap, it's a synthesis gap. Most teams already capture more than enough (scores, intent, activity, stage). What's missing is the last mile that turns all of it into "here are the 3 accounts you touch this week and why." That synthesis still lives in your best rep's gut or your best manager's read, which means it doesn't scale and it walks out the door when they leave. The teams that handle it well usually aren't winning on tooling, they're winning on ritual. A standing weekly decision where the signals get forced into explicit calls: push this, kill this, work this, with the reasoning attached. The Clay table or saved view feeds the ritual, it doesn't replace it. The ones still guessing on Monday usually have great dashboards and no forcing function. Curious whether you're seeing the gap more on the sales side or the CS book, because "about to expand" and "about to churn" are really different signals and most teams treat them the same.