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, usually two or three times each week. Scan through just a few of these 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, March 9, 2026. More importantly, these are the pages that I thought you should know about today!

Thanks for reading! See you in the morning, Rich

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

Turn ChatGPT into your on-demand GTM consultant
A diagnostic framework shows how marketing teams can codify consulting expertise into AI to analyze revenue architecture and GTM performance.
Rewriting the Digital Playbook
The $300 billion software reset and why your next app might just be a prompt.
Dear SaaStr: How Can I Become a Better VP of Sales?
Most CROs and VPs of Sales fail not because they can’t sell, but because they don’t understand what the job actually is. It’s not managing a team. It’s not building process decks. It’s not attending QBRs. It’s making your number — quarter after quarter — while simultaneously building a machine that will make next year’s number.
Agentic AI in Marketing: A Brief Guide to What’s Changing and How to Prepare
Understanding what’s changing, what’s coming, and how to prepare for an agentic AI-powered future is essential for marketers looking to navigate these shifts effectively.

Stop Discounting. Start Deploying. The New Way to Close Deals in B2B + AI.
We've all been there, multiple times. It's the end of the quarter. The deal is close but not closed. And the sales team pulls out the oldest trick in the book: "We'll give you a discount if you sign by Friday." It works sometimes. But it's lazy. It trains your buyers to wait for discounts. It compresses your margins. And worst of all — it doesn't actually solve the prospect's real problem, which is that they're not yet sure your product is going to work for them.
The Yin and Yang of Lifecycle Marketing
Why ad hoc campaigns deserve a seat at the table — and how to use them intentionally
The 5 AI Skills That Determine If You're Becoming More Valuable or More Replaceable
Most leaders measure AI readiness on one dimension, tool proficiency, while ignoring the four others that determine whether AI makes them more valuable or more replaceable
The Old Rules of Work Are Dying. Most People Won’t Notice Until Their Job Disappears
The people who play by the new rules will have one thing in common. Early movers are already doing this now.

Measuring Content Marketing in the AI Age, Part 2: The Trust Lattice Framework
You can’t measure the health of your audience relationship using funnels or pipelines. You need a latticework. It’s an integral component of the recently introduced Audience Trust Index, a better way to assess if your marketing is doing its job.
Mind The Agentic Action Gap: Stop Losing Money With AI Agents
Too many AI agent implementations are struggling to get ROI. The problem stems from poor integration of agent models with business workflows. Read this report to learn how you can measure your agentic action gap and, more importantly, close it.
Turning CRM Data Into AI-Ready Insights: What That Means for Marketing Teams Today
AI doesn’t just promise efficiency. It raises expectations. Leadership expects clearer insight into pipeline and performance. Sales expects better prioritization. Marketing expects systems to work together instead of requiring constant cleanup.
Why a Value Model Changes Everything in B2B SaaS
Your reps aren't failing to sell. They're failing to prove value. There's a difference..and it's the one that keeps deals out of finance and discounts off the table.

The AI Skill Flip: How Smart Professionals Are Reinventing Work
The moment was widely framed as a challenge to Google’s dominance in search, but the deeper shift was the arrival of a new generation of productivity tools accessible to both enterprises and individuals. Suddenly, millions of professionals had systems capable of drafting, researching, summarizing, coding, analyzing, and synthesizing information in seconds. The result was not just a change in software, but the beginning of a fundamental shift in how people work.
AgentOps and operationalizing AI agents for the enterprise
AgentOps, short for agent operations, is an emerging set of practices for managing the full lifecycle of AI agents in production. It extends principles from DevOps and MLOps to agentic systems, with a focus on reliability, governance, transparency, security, and cost control.
The Moment Every Business Must Upgrade Its Growth Engine
Instead of relying on random marketing or inconsistent outreach, Lead360 creates a structured growth engine that works continuously in the background.
Backing the ‘uninvestables’ - and what I learned from backing them anyway
Too often the best deals almost never get made. Somewhere in the process a perfectly rational person will point to something - some data, their market, the business model, and say: ‘this is uninvestable’. In fact, if someone isn’t saying this then actually you probably need to look again at your process.

AI won't kill marketing. We'll do it ourselves.
On the other hand, as marketers, we have known for years that almost 50% of MarTech tools either go unused or hardly prove their ROI. So there shouldn’t even be a question of whether the AI bubble is real when it comes to how unlikely it is that the promises of productivity will pay off. In general, multiple studies over the last few weeks from institutional giants like Harvard have revealed that AI is increasing employee workload, not productivity.
The 5 trends reshaping identity resolution in 2026
Our new buyer's guide shows how clean rooms, real-time identity graphs and multi-ID ecosystems are changing how marketers connect customer data.
How mature is your sales team?
Imagine a sales person who was just hired for a B2B sales position. What type of sales organization will she be joining? Will she be treated to a full introduction program and learning the ropes from top performers? Will her sales manager assign realistic goals and dedicate time to coach her? Will she receive a steady flow of marketing qualified leads where there is already promising customer engagement?
Sales and Marketing Alignment Insights, Strategies, and Success Indicators
The funnel is no longer split horizontally between marketing and sales duties, explains podcast guest Matt Heinz. Times have changed.

Should You Coach That Salesperson, Or Fire Them?
The sales profession is not for the faint of heart. There comes a time in nearly every salesperson’s life when they wonder if they’re really cut out for this work. And there comes a time in nearly every sales leader’s life when they wonder if someone on their team is really cut out for the work.
The Secret to Scalable B2B Marketing and Sales: Business Automation
Many B2B businesses struggle to keep up with rapidly evolving market trends—including automation—resulting in ineffective marketing and sales strategies.
Defending Trust In The Age Of Deepfakes: 3 Capabilities Every Business Needs
As deepfakes have gotten more sophisticated, they’ve also gotten more accessible to malicious actors, with off-the-shelf AI tools widely available online. Now, any business, not just a large enterprise or celebrity, is at risk, especially since attackers could be motivated by everything from financial gain to personal grievances or public disruption.
Why AI in Contact Centers Sets Businesses Up for Success
AI in contact centers has fundamentally changed how businesses need to think about workforce strategy. With the right cloud and AI capabilities, remote and hybrid models elevate both advisor performance and customer satisfaction.

The Experience Economy: Why Experience Is Now the Product
And thanks to ubiquitous digital technology, customers now compare an experience with a business against the best experiences they’ve had anywhere, regardless of industry. Businesses are expected to instantly make sense of a problem and seamlessly execute a resolution. Don’t waste the customer’s time, and don’t fuel their frustration.
Why your outreach fails before prospects even read it
Messaging success depends on how buyers process what they read. Learn how readability, tone, cognitive load and channel influence response.
Who Owns the Customer Experience?
Despite the vast technological and attitudinal changes in customer experience delivery over many decades, many organizations still don’t know where to put CX, Forrester Research concludes in a new report. In fact, at many organizations, no one department owns the function, the research firm found, noting that the CX function can sit in many places on an org chart and determining the right location for the CX function requires evaluating many complex variables.
The New Rules of Marketing Measurement in 2026: Why Unified Models Are Replacing Attribution
Across organizations, measurement remains fragmented. Performance teams focus on clicks, brand teams emphasize long-term effects, finance looks at revenue efficiency, and attribution tries to reconcile everything in between. This friction slows decisions at a time when marketers need coherence and speed. A shift is now underway to rebuild confidence across the C-suite and create systems that reflect true business impact.

2 Habits of Sellers Who Hit Sales Quotas
Hitting quota aligned with various shared behaviors among respondents. These “deep sellers” put effort into actions that impacted their selling success for the better. They also found that these deep sellers only account for approximately 18% of all sellers.
Why most marketers are still only experimenting with AI
Executives are pushing hard for AI adoption, but most marketing teams lack the needed strategy, training and data.
Trust, Reviews, and Algorithms: What Marketers Must Know in the Era of AI Search
Looking ahead to 2026, brands that focus solely on speed and frictionless checkout will struggle. The next wave of e-commerce growth will be led by brands that pair AI-driven discovery with trust, transparency, and the signals shoppers need to feel confident saying “yes” the first time.
How Salesforce Is Rebuilding Marketing Cloud for the Age of AI
With the renaming of Marketing Cloud to Agentforce Marketing, the announcement wasn’t just a new name. It was the first major step into 2026 – the year in which businesses will fully embrace an AI-driven future.

Why Is Building Rapport in Sales A Powerful Strategy?
If sellers don’t ensure they’re making meaningful connections with a prospect, they likely will not get very far. As David Priemer, Cerebral Selling, explains, when sales reps fail to build rapport early in the relationship, buyers tend to remain guarded.
The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?
You likely breathed a sigh of relief when the timeline for the cookie death got pushed back. But that was just the warm-up act. Privacy laws are fracturing the internet into dozens of tiny legal zones. Trying to manage compliance manually with a spreadsheet is now a fast track to a lawsuit. To survive this chaos, you need more than a banner. You need consent orchestration platforms to handle the heavy lifting of legal logic automatically.
Why Cold Outreach Alone No Longer Works
Cold outreach still works.

But by itself, it’s weak.

Most companies rely on sending more emails, making more calls, or connecting with more people on LinkedIn. The problem isn’t effort — the problem is context.
Every Sales Leader Needs a Moat. Most Don’t Have One.
In that environment, the people who cut through aren’t the ones with the longest CVs or the loudest profiles. They’re the ones you can pin down on what they believe - and why. The ones whose thinking has been tested in real rooms, with real pressure, on real revenue. That’s the moat. And most people haven’t built it - not because they lack the experience, but because nobody ever asked them to articulate it.

AI in B2B Sales: How Can This Powerful Tool Help?
AI in B2B sales isn’t just here. It’s growing, and sellers are looking for ways to tackle this powerful tool for their own success. Specifically, SalesFuel’s Voice of the Sales Rep study found that of those who use AI, most use it for customer research, data analysis and task automation.
Why Relationship Managers Outperform Traditional Sales Roles
Many companies measure success solely by pipeline activity. But the pipeline can be short-term. Relationships create continuity, even when clients change roles, industries, or companies. Teams that invest in trust and long-term connection often see loyalty and growth follow.
Should I Run 20+ AI Agents the Way SaaStr Does?
The honest answer: probably not entirely like us. But you should start now — because the gap between teams who have been running agents for 12 months and those who haven’t is compounding every week.
Creating an Effective Predictable Pipeline Playbook
The biggest misconception in pipeline strategy is that more campaigns, more channels, and more experiments automatically lead to better results. In reality, funnel thinking often fragments growth.