In partnership with
Dark social, pricing mistakes and partner plays
3 insights, 1 offer
Read Time = 3 minutes
Introducing the first AI-native CRM
Connect your email, and you’ll instantly get a CRM with enriched customer insights and a platform that grows with your business.
With AI at the core, Attio lets you:
Prospect and route leads with research agents
Get real-time insights during customer calls
Build powerful automations for your complex workflows
Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.
THE BRIEFING
Research shows 70% of B2B buyers feel overwhelmed by sales outreach. Their response? Pick a favorite vendor early (before ever talking to you) and stick with them 77% of the time. By the time your AE gets the intro, the deal's mostly done
My take: Sales isn't just about persuasion anymore, it's a confirmation process. The real battle happens in dark social, review sites, and peer conversations. If you're not there, you don't exist.
38% of SaaS companies now use usage-based pricing, but most implement it wrong. This guide explains the three-factor framework for choosing between usage-based, tiered, per-user, and value-based models—and why 2026 isn't the time for blunt price hikes.
My take: Usage-based pricing sounds customer-friendly until your reps can't quote deals and finance can't recognize revenue. CFOs hate unpredictable bills and comp plans become a nightmare when deal values fluctuate monthly. Clay and Snowflake make it work because they built dashboards and alerts FIRST. Most founders just bolt it on and create chaos for their GTM teams.
How to Get Partners to Reach Out to YOU
This is my favorite partner play to use when building a new channel
Step 1: Build an "ecosystem" page on your website
List 15-20 solutions that complement yours across different categories. Think integrations, adjacent tools, platforms your customers already use. Run this play even if you don’t have existing partner or integrations, yet.
Win-win... you're bringing the partner warm leads and all it cost you nothing
Step 2: Put their logos up with backlinks
Link directly to their sites. Bonus: reach out and see if you can get discount codes for your referrals. Most will say yes, it costs them nothing and you're driving traffic.
Step 3: Track everything
Which logos get clicked. Which integrations your team gets asked about. Where actual interest lives in your customer base. Use UTM parameters, track pageviews, monitor support tickets.
Step 4: Wait 30-60 days and let the data pile up
Don't rush this. You need real numbers not "we think our customers would like this."
Step 5: Reach out with quantified demand
"Hey, we put you on our marketplace 60 days ago. Since then, we've had 63 users click through to you and 18 inbound requests specifically asking about an integration. Open to a convo?"
OBJECTION: "this is misleading, you're listing partnerships you don't have."
Two ways to handle it:
1. you're not claiming to have built anything, you're just pointing people to complementary solutions.
2. when someone asks about an integration, be honest:
"we don't have it built yet, but we are starting to scope what an integration could look like - open to giving your input?"
LinkedIn Post of the Week
The HubSpot CEO just posted this.
We’ve been talking about signals for 2-3 years on Twitter (and LinkedIn).
When you think you're late, you're actually early.
The bleeding edge lives in your timeline.
The Best Thing I Heard This Week
Shoutout to Indiana football and their fans
One More Thing - an offer for YOU
If you’re a Seed-Series B leader staring down 2026 wondering how to hit your number - I'm doing 3 full GTM Assessments in January. I'll audit partnerships, outbound, inbound— then give you a prioritized playbook for what actually drives pipeline.
Reply if you’re interested.
TSG
P.S. I reply to all emails.