Look over my shoulder!

Every day I scan the outputs of hundreds of news feeds and alerts. During my daily research, I see lots of interesting stuff: news items, hot tips and much, much more. Of course, I store things away in my own PKM for future writing projects; but I have always thought I was shortchanging you folks by not immediately sharing the best stuff with you! So, now I will share these items with you in a POST on this blog that I will try to create every day. Scan through just a few of my posts and I assure you that you will learn something you would never have seen otherwise!

These are the pages that I found interesting today, February 20, 2026. More importantly, these are the pages that I thought you should know about today!

Thanks for reading!, Rich

P.S. If you want to be sure to automatically get each day's edition, just subscribe to my free Substack!

Will AI make your CRM more effective?
CRM systems have the potential to help your sales and marketing team improve and drive more revenue. But to date, they haven't done that for most teams.
The One Industry That Will Surpass AI (And Outlast Every Tech Boom)
It isn’t a trend or a bubble. It’s the longest-lived opportunity of a lifetime — even if everything gets automated out from under us.
We Built Social Media Echo Chambers. Now We’re Building AI Yes-Men.
The AI on your screen right now probably agrees with everything you say and makes you feel like a bit of a super hero. Why?
The AI-Native Revenue Engine
Artificial intelligence is not fundamentally transforming go-to-market because it drafts emails faster, generates content more efficiently, or automates surface-level workflows. It is transforming go-to-market because it alters how information moves across the revenue organization, and in doing so, reshapes the structural foundations upon which modern GTM systems are built.

Martech in the Post-Model Era: Why Systems Matter More Than Algorithms?
AI models are strong, but they don’t make businesses valuable on their own. Algorithms can score leads, write copy, predict churn, or optimize bids, but none of those things matter if they don’t connect to how marketing really works. Marketing is not a lab; it is a living system made up of people, data, channels, rules, and actions.
Moving CRM Beyond Data to Emotional Intelligence
By 2030, forecasts show that the global CRM market will exceed $163 billion. More than anything else, CRM is a tool that offers visibility. But is it enough? Are you sacrificing empathy at the altar of data? The truth is, emotions still play an important role in driving lasting customer relations.
AI disruption in 2026: What SaaS founders are actually doing
To understand how SaaS companies are building with AI today, we surveyed founders, product managers, and operators from sectors including healthcare, marketing, sports tech, IoT, B2B tools, and platform‑as‑a‑service products. Our goal wasn’t to glorify AI or warn against it, but to map how teams are learning, and adapting in real time.
The future of marketing won’t be automated. It will be human.
The next era of marketing will not be defined by technology alone. It will be defined by judgment, how brands choose to use AI, manage truth in an age of misinformation, and build trust while audiences fragment and institutions weaken.

AI Hype and the Search for Meaning
You can’t just believe things about AI quietly. You have to announce what you believe. You need to vague-post about how ‘Something is Happening’. You need an article, a manifesto, a capital-T Theory of the Case. You need a Substack, or god forbid, a podcast. It’s easy to overlook this, or say that things have always been this way. But posting is the most powerful force in the universe, and we forget that at our peril.
How To Build Agentic Workflows That Support Your Content Strategy
Frustrated by AI tools that fall short? The solution isn’t trying tool after tool. It lies in building an agentic AI workflow that aligns tools, memory, and human oversight. Follow this advice to do just that.
Complete Guide to Sales Funnel Tracking in 2026
Sales funnel tracking acts as the GPS for your customer journey. It moves you past metrics like “total clicks” and gives you the exact coordinates of user behavior. It’s the difference between guessing why you’re losing leads and knowing exactly how to fix the leak. In this guide, we’ll cut through the analysis paralysis and show revenue leaders, growth and product marketers, CRO teams, and scaling founders how to build a tracking system that turns raw data into a high-converting sales engine.
Before You Sell: 6 Questions to Understand Your Customer
MorGetting the right customer isn’t magic. It’s about clarity. In sales, too many people take whatever comes their way. That’s not integrity selling. That’s guessing. If you want to sell with purpose, you need to know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from every angle. Here’s where to start.

The path to purchase just got dramatically shorter
Holiday data shows consumers deciding faster than ever, pushing marketers to build frictionless, trust-first experiences that convert in a single moment.
From Maybes to Money: Diagnostic Rigor Applied to Pipeline Management
The uncomfortable truth: most of what sits in your pipeline isn't real. It's wishes dressed up as opportunities.
A Playbook for Marketing-Led Growth | Marketing Smarts Live Show
This episode of the Marketing Smarts Live Show with Amrita Mathur, VP of marketing at Superside, provided invaluable insights for B2B marketers: from optimizing for learning to humanizing marketing efforts and regularly updating buyer personas.
Stop Chasing Growth: Remove the Three Barriers to Building Brand Preference
Most professional services firms desire growth. Growth provides scale, opportunity, and wealth. But growth isn't something you chase; it's something you earn.

The Complete AI Search Playbook for Marketers
The way people get information has changed more in the past year than in the previous twenty. Search is no longer a list of links. Instead of typing a question into Google and scrolling through ten blue links, billions of people are now getting direct answers from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
How to Build an AI Agent (OpenClaw) That Runs Your GTM with Koka Sexton
This week is a two-for-one episode, which also makes it our longest one yet. Koka Sexton, an OG in B2B who helped pioneer the social selling movement, joins me for a great conversation. He’s leading the charge on agentic marketing and AI agents and walks through a few Make.com workflows in detail.
The GTM spending problem no one wants to admit
New data shows more than half of enterprise GTM spend is ineffective while PR quietly delivers the highest return.
The New Measurement Stack: Why Identity Graphs Need Real-Time Activity to Stay Useful
Identity graphs are very good at storing relationships. They can tell you that an email was once associated with a device, that a phone number belonged to an account, or that a household made a purchase. What they can’t tell you is whether those relationships still describe the same person today.

Empowering Sales Success—The Role of Marketing in Sales Enablement: Owen Richards on Marketing Smarts
"Get involved in the sales process," he advises. "Go sit in some demos, go sit in on some discoveries, handle some inbound inquiries, make a few cold calls, go and have some conversations, know what it feels like, know what it looks like." Because the more empathetic Marketing is to Sales, and vice versa, the more successful your sales enablement will be.
The Ultimate Guide to Building Your Agentic AI Workflow With Claude Cowork
7 advanced AI agentic use cases to unlock Cowork's full potential.
7 Infographics to Fix Your Marketing System in 2026
Business growth is all about getting warm qualified prospects in your system. Now the question is how do you get this consistently? Outbound? Ads? Leadgen? Content? Well, the answer is to systemize your approach.
Email Marketing Is Now a Machine-to-Machine Sport
Agents run campaigns. Assistants summarize messages. Humans see what the systems decide is worth attention.

The 90/10 Rule for AI Agents, A Deep Dive: When To Replace Paid SaaS Tools With a Vibe-Coded Apps. And When Not To.
We’re now nine months into running SaaStr AI as three humans, one dog, and 20+ AI agents. We’ve vibe-coded 8+ apps into production. We’ve bought dozens of third-party AI tools. And in the last two weeks alone, we built two new apps — one internal, one external-facing — that taught us some hard lessons about when to build, when to buy, and why the old rules are changing fast. Here’s the updated playbook.
Kana raises $15M to build AI agents for marketers
Serial martech founders exit stealth with AI agent platform for marketing automation
The future of CRM: what’s changing and why it matters
AI CRM shifts data work from humans to software, automatically capturing context so teams can focus on relationships
Salesforce appoints 6 new leaders in an executive shake-up after 5 high-profile departures
Salesforce has hired or promoted six new leaders, replacing five high-profile leaders who have announced departures from the company since December, according to a person familiar with the changes.

The Post That Changed How I Think About My Sales Team
AI is compressing the gap between insight and action in sales. Teams with clean data and living records turn automation into structural revenue advantage…
The Right Way to Incorporate AI into a Pre-Sales Strategy
BDRs and SDRs are proving grounds to do lead scoring, research, cold calls and lead qualification. Focused on the early stage in the sales process, companies often hire junior sellers for these roles so they can learn the fundamentals of sales before they go in for high-profile pitches. However, make no mistake, these are vital touchpoints in the sales cycle and first impressions are irreplaceable.
The Best Way to Track Sales Targets in Salesforce
Discover How GSP Target Tracker Brings Visibility and Control to Quota Tracking and Sales Target Reports in Salesforce.
AI Is a Mirror – It Doesn’t Fix Sales, It Reveals What’s Broken
AI doesn’t break sales. It exposes the difference between organizations that operate with decision discipline and those that operate on narrative. McKinsey & Company puts it bluntly: adoption is widespread, but enterprise-wide impact remains uncommon.

How Competitive Intelligence Transforms SaaS Product Strategy
Competitive intelligence provides the missing market perspective product teams need to make investment decisions confidently. Product planning meetings often stall when debating which features to prioritise, like advanced reporting or mobile apps. Decisions are often based on stories from customers, sales, or competitors.
Your CRM knows more about your buyers than your personas do
Your best marketing insights aren't in a new tool. They're already in your CRM, your CS notes and the systems your team stopped checking.
CEOs aren't seeing any AI productivity gains, yet some tech industry leaders are still convinced AI will destroy white collar work within two years
A massive survey by National Bureau of Economic Research shows limited AI impact, but continued hopes it'll boost productivity eventually
Why CMOs Struggle to Prove ROI, And How Unified Measurement Can Fix It
Less than a quarter of CMOs (22%) strongly agree with the notion that they have the “measurement insights” needed to justify value to their financial officers, according to recent research by Perion and Advertiser Perceptions that illustrates the gap between “two of the most revenue-focused roles in the company.”

Why B2B Software Firms Need a Go-to-Market Reset
n the B2B software market, buyers are increasingly skeptical of bold promises about AI solutions following many initial pilots that failed to deliver value. To stand out and compete with AI-native players, established vendors must: Demonstrate quick proof of value. Vendors need to put much more effort into the selling process, such as running a customized proof of concept using the customer’s data.
From post-mortem to pulse: Why measurement is the CMO’s new growth engine
Measurement is where that pressure — and that opportunity — converge. New AI-powered marketing measurement tools are transforming the CMO’s power to measure and plan, yet, somehow, they still suffer from an outdated, “back-office” reputation. It’s time for a reset.
Machine Customers: The Structural Break in Customer Experience
This isn’t another digital channel. It’s a shift in who — or what — makes the buying decision.
Stop duct-taping CRMs: Here’s a better path to AI ROI
While organizations continue focusing on CRM records, the real gold mine, real-time customer intent, lives in conversation data.