Sales

September 12, 2025
Newsletter

The biggest GTM lessons from INBOUND 2025

Hello and welcome to The GTMnow Newsletter – the media brand of VC firm, GTMfund. Build, scale and invest with the best minds in tech.

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INBOUND conference is one of the biggest gatherings of GTM operators and founders. Whether you were among the thousands in San Francisco last week or you’re catching up from afar, we’ve got you covered with the most important takeaways.

It was the first year that the conference took place on the West Coast. Over three days we sat in on key sessions and traded notes with more than 50 GTM leaders.

In this edition, we break down four big takeaways that show where go-to-market is headed next.

There’s a VIP founder lunch at ApolloNEXT!

They’re hosting a private founder lunch at ApolloNEXT during SF Tech Week. 50 founders.

Picture this: mini-chats with Apollo execs who scaled the company from $10M → $150M ARR. No stage, no panels. You sitting close enough to them to ask the questions that actually matter, surrounded by founders who get it.

Here’s how to get your spot:

Step 1: Register for ApolloNEXT
Step 2: Apply here for the lunch
Step 3: Keep an eye on your inbox for updates

Growth is messy and AI is moving fast. This is an opportunity to trade frameworks and tactics with people who have “been there, done that.”

Seats are limited, register and apply now.

4 key things to know from INBOUND

1. This isn’t the year of AI agents, it’s the decade of AI agents.

HubSpot’s CTO, Dharmesh Shah, had a keynote that everyone was buzzing about.

The title of his session was “You to the power of AI” because the real opportunity is taking the already-awesome people inside your company and multiplying their impact. Agents are how you get from you to you squared.

His core message: AI isn’t a competitor, it’s a co-founder or companion. The future of building is a hybrid company where humans provide creativity and judgment, and AI scales their impact. Companies that get this right now will have an unfair advantage.

AI agents are the natural evolution of the web and mobile eras. The interface is no longer a screen a human clicks through but an agent that consumes your product and data directly. If you are building anything new, you need to design for agents as a primary user.

The session is now also available on-demand:

2. It’s no longer a funnel, it’s a loop.

HubSpot launched a new marketing framework called The Loop, and it’s a direct response to a massive shift in how people find information.

60% of Google searches now end in zero clicks. People are getting answers from AI overviews or directly from large language models, not from your website.

The Loop is designed for this new reality. It moves away from a linear, one-and-done funnel and embraces a continuous feedback cycle.

Here’s the breakdown:

Express: Codify your brand’s unique voice. This is the human input that AI can’t replicate. It’s your taste.
Tailor: Use AI to make your message hyper-specific. This isn’t basic personalization; it’s using unstructured data to craft messages that feel custom-written for a single person.
Amplify: Distribute your content where your customers actually are. This is a move away from just relying on your website. They call this AI Engine Optimization (AEO), which is all about getting your brand mentioned on platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn so that AI engines recommend you.
Evolve: Use AI to quickly learn from your campaigns and adapt. You win by learning faster than your competitors, not by having a perfect launch.

Traffic isn’t the goal (though it should never have been the end goal). The goal is to create content so valuable that it’s worth mentioning and citing by people and AI alike.

3. People buy from people – personal distribution is a moat.

It was obvious from the numbers that people care about growing their personal brands, but you could literally feel that excitement when the LinkedIn growth session overflowed the room. People were either watching the slides or taking notes in their phones.

You need to earn mindshare long before buyers are ready to buy, and LinkedIn is the best place to do it right now.

The tactical playbook they shared is called JUICY:

Jazz First: Create content with zero asks. Build trust, then sell.
Unignorable Point of View: Take a stand. Don’t be “wedding chicken.”
IRobot Energy: Use AI for research, not writing. They even had a tip to strip metadata from AI-generated images to avoid algorithm penalties.
Comments as a Growth Engine: A single good comment can get 25K+ impressions. Post less, comment more.
You Are the Algorithm: Repeat your winning content in different formats until it stops working.

Alongside the JUICY framework, the speakers shared a set of LinkedIn growth tactics that had the room scrambling to take notes:

‘Also Followed By’ recommendation
Get your company page to appear in the “also followed by” recommendations on the biggest influencer pages in your niche.
• Identify the large “shark” pages your audience already follows.
• Comment consistently on their posts and engage their team members.
• Over time, LinkedIn starts recommending your page to their followers.

90-Day Repost Rule
Treat your best posts like assets. Every 90 days, repost them in a new format, tweaking the hook or format each time. Build a two-year evergreen library that compounds reach.

14% Link Hack
“Link in comments” isn’t all that it seems. Posts with early links see 50–60% less reach.
• Publish the post without a link.
• Wait 15–45 minutes for early engagement.
• Edit the post to add the link and keep it under 14% of the character count.
LinkedIn’s algorithm has already cleared the post, so your reach stays intact.

Three-plus links bonus
If you add three or more links when you edit, LinkedIn often treats the post as a “resource post” and may actually boost its reach.

Comments as a growth engine
A single smart comment can reach 25K–100K impressions. Post less and comment more. Keep a Notion library of memes, quotes and trending topics so you can quickly add high-value comments to viral posts.

Distribution is the final moat. Build an audience on a platform like LinkedIn, but then migrate them to an owned channel like a newsletter. The algorithms will change, but your direct relationship with your audience won’t.

4. Data is the new GTM operating system.

AI is fundamentally changing how you operate, not simply automating how you currently operate. The shift is from “use our app” to “our agent just gets it done.” This means if you’re building a product, you should be thinking about how an AI agent would interact with it.

This also shifts go-to-market strategy from a function-first to systems-first approach.

Data is shifting from static dashboards to a live operating system that drives day-to-day decisions. Instead of looking back at quarterly metrics, teams are using real-time signals (usage spikes, buying intent, support trends) to trigger automated campaigns or even deploy AI agents instantly.

This requires centralization, which only works if the data is accurate and consistently maintained. Automated data hygiene is a necessity so that AI models have trusted inputs. Without that foundation, every downstream agent or AI workflow simply scales bad data faster.

Vanta’s CRO, Stevie Case, described how her team is breaking down the old silos of sales, success and support. Instead of handing customers from one department to another, they are building a single system where data flows seamlessly across the entire journey.

That unified data layer means reps no longer waste hours on admin. Personalized follow-up emails, for example, are generated at the push of a button. The payoff: selling time is approaching 50%, a benchmark every GTM leader should be tracking. More from Stevie on Vanta’s growth in this recent podcast episode.

Dharmesh Shah called “context queen.” In practice, context is the company’s data: every customer interaction, product signal and marketing touchpoint. The richer and more current that context, the more powerful your AI agents and personalization engines become.

This “operating system” is not a stack of disconnected tools. It’s a clean, centralized data foundation that lets founders build to learn, experimenting with small solutions before making big platform bets. This does have ARR implications for startups, which you can read about here.

The goal is not just automation. The goal is to free humans for the highest-value work: creative, high-stakes customer conversations. And it reshapes hiring. The strongest teams are now looking for growth-mindset generalists, people who can think end-to-end across the customer journey, while AI acts as the co-pilot that amplifies their impact.

Tag @GTMnow so we can see your takeaways and help amplify them.

GTM 162: From PLG to Enterprise: How to Layer Sales Without Breaking What Works Ghazi Masood (CRO, Retool; ex-Auth0, Microsoft) on adding sales to PLG without breaking what works.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTMnow Podcast.”

Speedchain raised $111M in equity and debt financing to modernize financial workflows in construction and project-driven industries. Backed by CIM, GTMfund, Village Global, and others, the company will accelerate go-to-market expansion and product innovation as it scales its AI-powered expense platform.

Vanta landed on the 2025 Forbes Cloud 100, joining the ranks of the world’s leading cloud and AI companies. With 12K+ customers and strong momentum, the company credits its team, partners, and customers for the milestone.

On How I Hire, Andy Mowat talks with Patty DuChene, SVP at Sendoso, about her 45-day framework for rebuilding teams, why she skips case studies, and how she finds hidden talent in hospitality vets and returning parents.

Canva kicked off an employee stock sale at a $42B valuation, giving staff liquidity ahead of a likely IPO. With 240M monthly users and $3.3B in revenue, the company is doubling down on AI tools while adding Fidelity and JPMorgan as backers.

As part of its Series C, Linear completed its first tender offer, giving current and former employees liquidity at a $1.25B valuation. The move is part of “Linear Infinity,” a long-term ownership program that adds equity flexibility, time-off benefits, and refreshers to help teammates stay and grow with the company.

Head of Growth at Stotles (Hybrid – London, UK)
Customer Success Manager, Mid Market at Spekit (Hybrid – Denver, CO)
Customer Success Manager at Gorgias (Remote – Vancouver)
Sales Development Manager at Writer (Hybrid – New York)
Customer Success Manager at Amper (Remote – US)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

Upcoming events you won’t want to miss:

Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)
National Mall Walk with GTMfund: September 25, 2025 (Washington, DC)
Dreamforce: October 14-16, 2025 (San Francisco, CA)
GTMfund Dinner (private registration): October 22, 2025 (Austin, TX)
GTMfund Dinner (private registration): November 18, 2025 (Toronto, ON)
GTMfund Dinner (private registration): November 19, 2025 (New York, NY)
GTM x Founder Event (private registration): November 20, 2025 (New York, NY) – if you’re an AI-focused founder in NYC, hit reply to get the details