The Surface Problem
Why growth leaders are losing their grip — and how we find it together.
I wake up most mornings feeling behind.
Not behind in the way I was behind five years ago, when behind meant the pipeline was soft or the campaign wasn’t converting. Behind in a different way, and one that’s harder to shake, because the pace of what’s changing outstrips any single person’s ability to process it, even someone whose entire professional life is organized around doing exactly that.
I do this for a living. I read about AI tools. I implement them with clients. I write about what I’m learning, every week, in this publication. I run a consulting practice built on the belief that publicly available data can change the way growth leaders find and reach buyers. And still, most mornings, I shove myself into my desk chair and feel the gap between where things are and where I can confidently say I understand them.
I tell you this not to unsettle you, but because I think you feel it too. And because I think the honest starting point for what I want to say today is that the feeling is not a failure of effort. It is a signal. The surface area you used to grip is changing shape.
That feeling is the center of everything built at Cannonball GTM, and it’s the center of what I want to talk about today.
The surface area problem is a confidence and knowledge problem, not a resource problem. Growth leaders aren’t failing because they lack tools or headcount. They’re failing because the landscape is shifting faster than their process, and without enough knowledge to navigate that shift confidently, the only available move is to grip what’s familiar: the existing stack, the existing motion, the existing playbook.
The familiar surface is eroding. And what’s replacing it requires a different kind of grip.
Here is what I believe is happening, stated as plainly as I can.
The buyer’s journey is changing, and everything else follows from that. B2B buyers are increasingly making decisions before they ever engage with a sales team, using AI to research vendors, evaluate options, and form preferences in channels that most RevTech stacks were never designed to see. That single shift is the supermodel. Every downstream prediction flows from it.
The RevTech stack as we’ve known it will look unrecognizable within a few years, not because the tools are bad but because they were built for buyer behavior that is already changing. The organizational structures we built around that stack, the SDR function, the demand gen motion, the handoff between marketing and sales, will change with it.
The orchestration layer, where tools like Clay and Claude Code currently live alongside each other, is beginning to see a new class of entrants. Not the legacy giants (Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, the dinosaurs whose food is still sitting on the plate from 2015) but purpose-built, AI-native platforms like Atlas that are designed from the ground up for the way modern GTM motions actually work. What operators are building by hand in Clay and Claude Code today, these platforms are beginning to offer as configurable infrastructure. The handcrafted becomes the standard feature. That is a meaningful shift, and it will change what skills matter and what tools are worth learning.
And running through all of it is a shift in where information asymmetry lives. The competitive advantage is no longer in accessing data. It’s in synthesizing it, combining public signals in ways that reveal what no single source could show alone.
This is not a prediction designed to create urgency. It’s context, because the only way to navigate a landscape this fluid is to understand the shape of the current before you try to swim in it.
For most of Cannonball GTM’s existence, one of the foundational positions has been that tooling is for tools, meaning process clarity comes first, and technology is the mechanism for executing a well-designed process. That was the right position for the era in which it was stated, when the primary risk was that growth leaders would reach for a new tool before they understood what they were trying to accomplish.
That position needs an update. Not a reversal, the logic still holds. But each of the five playbooks we teach now has a tool dimension that can no longer be treated as secondary. The tools aren’t separate from the process anymore. In many cases, they are the process, and understanding how they’re evolving, how the orchestration layer is shifting, how AI-native platforms are beginning to absorb what we used to build by hand, is now part of what it means to run a competent growth motion.
Our commitment, going forward, is to track both. The process and the tools that execute it, together, in service of playbooks that take you from concept to implementation.
Cannonball GTM began with a specific thesis: publicly available data can find and reach buyers more effectively than the firmographic and demographic lists most growth leaders are still using. That thesis has not changed. But it has expanded.
We are no longer talking exclusively about outbound. We are no longer talking exclusively about vertical SaaS companies or organizations selling into highly regulated industries where public data happens to be unusually rich. Because even with limited public information, signals-based approaches produce dramatically better segmentation, which produces better unit economics, which produces a more efficient growth motion for a much broader range of sellers and marketers than the ones we started with.
The full buyer’s journey is now the frame. Publicly available data informs not just who you reach and when, but how your buyers are finding you, what they know before they engage, and what they need from you at each stage of the journey. That is the surface we are helping growth leaders grip.
One more thing, and I want to say it directly.
No single person can stay on top of all of this. The pace of change in AI tools, in buyer behavior research, in RevTech infrastructure, in implementation practice, is simply too fast for any one writer or practitioner to track with the depth it deserves.
So Cannonball GTM is changing how it works. Going forward, we will draw on deep expertise from within our community, practitioners who are working inside revenue orchestration, inbound strategy, signals-based segmentation, and the evolving tool stack every day, not just writing about it. People who are taking the theory and implementing it live, in real client engagements and real growth motions, and bringing back what they’re learning.
And here’s the thing I want you to know about these practitioners. They are not standing above this moment looking down at it. They are inside it, the same as you. Terrified, frankly, the same as you. And the same as me. But there is something clarifying about being terrified together, with people who are actually implementing, actually learning what works, actually bringing back what they find. That’s what this living lab is. Not a faculty. A cohort.
Now let me tell you what we’re actually building toward, because I don’t want it to get lost in the mechanics of tools and processes and playbooks.
If we do this right, none of the individual pieces are the point. Not the public data, not the tool stack, not the new org structures. The point is what happens when all of it comes together. We reach buyers at the moment of greatest need, when the pain is real and the urgency is genuine and they are actively looking for someone who understands their situation better than they do. That is not just a pipeline outcome. That is a brand outcome. It is how lasting credibility gets built. It is how companies earn the kind of reputation that compounds over time, that makes the next buyer easier to reach and the next conversation easier to start.
Better processes, enabled by better data and better tooling, is the path. But reaching the right buyer at the right moment with something they genuinely need — that is the destination. And it is worth the work.
The cannonball is still moving. It has always been moving. What changes today is that we are bringing in more of the people who are helping to aim it.
With love, from your friend in terror,
Doug
New to Cannonball GTM?
The Cannonball GTM methodology helps growth leaders find hidden customers and deliver messages worth receiving. Here’s where to go next:
Start here → The full Cannonball GTM orientation — what we do, why it works, and where to begin. [Start Here]
Go deeper → The PVP Framework: The methodology behind messages your prospects would actually pay to receive. [The Secret Sauce]
See it in action → The Art of Simplicity: How to make complex data into messages that land. [Read the Post] (paid)
“No single person can stay on top of all of this” - massive issue for early adopters is TRYING to consume everything and getting constantly distracted/ side tracked, never finishing anything and creating a paralysis state of FOMO