BTW - Every Wednesday I take a hot take from LinkedIn and answer the pushback live. Every other week I break down the biggest go-to-market news instead. This week's hot take is one I posted a month ago. It drew hundreds of thousands of views and a lot of disagreement, so I took the toughest comments live.

If you think I'm wrong, drop it in the comments. I read them all.

Let's dig in.

Jason Lemkin posted that he churned Notion after about seven years. Nothing was wrong with it. He just didn't need it anymore.

That stopped me. No complaint. No product conversation. No roadmap request. Just quiet.

We did the same thing at GTM Partners, a $10M business.

We don't run a CRM anymore.

Bryan built one over the weekend. It's not the best, but it works for our use case. We'd also used Notion for a couple of things, and we moved on.

Notion probably didn't see it coming. Jason's post reached 100,000 people. Then a YouTube video. Then this live. Notion lost credibility with close to a million people without doing anything wrong.

That's quiet churn. It never shows up as a complaint, and it's killing legacy products. The frontier AI companies aren't safe from it either.

I dug into this with the founders and CEOs in my weekly roundtables. The same problem kept coming up.

AI products ship so fast that neither the customer nor the go-to-market team can keep up. The product becomes the best-kept secret in the account. The customer says: "I'm drowning. I don't need more product. I need strategy."

Two conversations made it real:

Symptom: a growing logo count, healthy-looking usage, and a press release about the raise, while the account is dying inside.

Fix: stop shipping to customers who haven't adopted what they already have.

Option A: hire a customer success team to teach the product.
We did this at Terminus. It worked when product releases came once or twice a year. Now they come every week, sometimes every day. No enablement team can keep up. And a junior hire can't show a VP of growth where to click. The VP has bigger problems than that.

Option B: put a strategist next to the customer.
That's what I call a Forward Deployment Operator (FDO). It's a fractional go-to-market leader who has been a VP of growth, sales, or marketing at a similar-stage company. The CEOs I'm working with now ask for exactly that. Match the customer's strategist with a strategist who has done it before.

Customers don't need to know where to click. The interface should feel like ChatGPT or Claude, where you start typing. They need someone who connects their strategy to the execution.

Symptom: you keep hiring customer success to fix a problem that isn't about clicking.

Fix: enablement is a strategy problem, not an execution problem. Send a peer, not a trainer.

"How would I know this is happening to me?" (Jeremy)
Usage can mislead you. We used Notion every day right up until we dropped it. So segment your customers by size and deal value: enterprise, mid-market, SMB. Then talk to them. Not an email blast or a feature announcement. A real conversation. There's no substitute. The alternative is that the CEO talks to every customer later, at renewal, when it's too late.

"Is enablement the moat now, more than AI?" (Toby)
AI isn't the moat. Every company will have it, like the internet. AI is useful for analyzing thousands of customers. Enablement isn't a CS team job anymore. It's a strategy job. One client I told to stop launching product. I asked them: what's the one feature your customers need? Focus there.

Think of Bending Spoons. They buy dead companies, like Evernote. They cut features, raised prices, and let go of the low-tier customers asking for everything. The product does one thing, notes, and the business is profitable. I still use Evernote for one thing: capturing ideas while I walk around.

"If you only think about renewal 60 to 90 days out, have you already lost?" (Angela)
Mostly, yes. Never assume quiet customers will renew. When the renewal notice arrives, the customer asks two questions: "Am I glad I'm subscribed?" and "Why am I subscribed?" You want the first answer to be obvious. Don't wait for customers to tell you what they need. Don't focus only on the ones who complain.

"Who is actually using everything we build?" (Mandy)
Rephrase it: if the product is no longer the moat, what is? Anyone can build product now. My bet: 70 to 80% of tools in the market will go away. Companies will build their own go-to-market tech stack, with agents that run it. It's like the reverse of the shift from on-premise servers to the cloud.

What survives is the services model. This is the move from software as a service to service as software. Take ABM. Buying the tech plus hiring a person with the time and budget to run it costs about half a million dollars. Instead, companies will tell an agency: "Run ABM for these 100 accounts. I don't care what tech you use. Just show me what works." That's $10K to $30K a month.

"People avoid talking to customers because they fear more churn." (Nicholas)
I've heard this in three conversations in two weeks. CEOs are afraid to call customers who already bought. They know they can't satisfy them with more product anymore. They need a strategist in the room, or they lose that customer's faith.

"Should customer success own expansion?" (Christina)
The old model was one junior person for 30 or 40 customers. That's flipped. You need a senior executive talking to a senior executive: a VP of growth with a VP of growth. That's what changes business outcomes.

"Isn't this self-serving? A good product solves it."
Nobody cares about your product. It exists to serve an outcome. If a customer can't use it, you can't say they don't get it. Innovating too fast, too early, confuses customers, and that's the hidden cost of the speed AI gives product teams.

Go to runongtmos.com/move and take the free assessment. Over 5,000 companies have already run it. It'll show you the next step, not another motivational all-hands.

CEOs: if you want an fractional go to market operator to help you install the system, not a deck, check out the GTMarketplace.

Fractionals: 10+ years in GTM and want to become a Forward Deployment Operator? DM me on LinkedIn.

Now, let's get moving.

love,
sangram

p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more frameworks like this, follow along at runongtmos.com and let's keep moving.