GTM Strategy Sep 10, 2026 · 9 min read

TG

The post on our site a couple of weeks ago landed, for me, with a good metaphor: the headless horseman. AI GTM is riding hard, moving fast, minus the head: the traditional rep-led, calendar-booked, dial-for-dollars machine that used to sit on top of every sales org. He’s right. Our GTM world is getting turned upside down.

Here’s my “so what,” and it’s going to challenge some of the thinking behind “GTM Engineer,” “Revenue Engineer,” and every meeting insisting Rev Ops is suddenly a strategic function (it always was, if you were doing it right). Headless GTM today just means fewer humans doing cold outbound. That’s not a strategy. That’s a headcount decision. A dumb one, frankly, because it chooses automation that doesn’t work over people. The head coming off isn’t the interesting question. That’s happening regardless. The real question is what replaces it. I don’t have a crystal ball, but based on lived experience selling under very different regulations in a very different market, I have a decent hunch, and it’s going to make things awkward for a lot of people. Let me explain.

A version of this already played out

I’ve already watched a version of this play out, and I want to give credit where it’s due. I didn’t build what I’m about to describe. My team did. Together, they challenged business norms, best practices, and cultural status quo. Not because we felt like it, but because we had to. Our competitors were outspending us, out-sales-teaming us, out-connecting us, out-ecosysteming us. Playing their game would have meant losing. So we didn’t.

In Korea, where I’d moved from the US with a one-year-old and an extraordinarily patient husband, I ran a B2B revenue organization. Before the team flipped the table, GTM ran on one lever: reps and who they personally knew. Every rep had their own book of business. Intros moved through long-trusted relationships they’d built over years, and they rode their careers on it. Handing any of that reach to the company was never really in their interest. We didn’t even have a single CRM, or a consistent way to measure the funnel. A fine livelihood, but a terrible growth plan.

The company needed volume, scale, a real GTM engine: signals of intent, signals of outcome, signals of context and identity. Not just noise. Oh, and we had a meager advertising budget, no room to hire, no clear market differentiation, and a brutally competitive media and advertising landscape. Oh, and cold calling and cold emailing were off the table because of regulatory and privacy rules. So individual reps, relying only on their own networks, were never going to get us there.

My team had to find volume without cold outbound. Without much ad or media budget. There were no shortcuts available to us.

So the team did something that seemed unnatural at the time. We combined our books and built a system the whole team could use to scale together. Referrals that moved through the company and the brand, not through any one person’s Rolodex. Blogs that were direct, genuine, and actually helpful to small business owners. Fixing the platform for what actually helped sellers be successful, not just the cool widgets. Work that built trust. Clear communication about what we were doing (and not doing) and why, even when it looked nothing like the rest of the market. Internal systems instrumented so we could meet the customer at the exact moment they needed us and actually resolve the issue: no dead-end support calls, no help article that technically answered the question and helped no one. Everyone rowing the boat in the same direction, without attribution, goal, or measurement conflict. Just real people showing up and doing the work, figuring out the context that mattered.

What they built was uncomfortable for some. Every touch had to earn its own permission. No blast, no spray, no “that’s my contact.” They had to be so clear on the value proposition that a prospect would choose to raise a hand rather than get chased into a meeting.

I pushed one question relentlessly, so often the team started writing the answer straight into our docs. The question: “So what?” So what does this REALLY do for the buyer? So what if we didn’t do a thing, or did it. So, what? I know it’s harsh, but getting out of a playbook mindset, much less communicating cross-culturally, required a direct and sometimes uncomfortable approach. Instead of one hero sales rep, we built a process for everyone to share how they won. We tested, failed, iterated, and won. We learned openly from our losses, because we knew the person to our left and right was going to do better because of it.

That’s headless GTM. Not “no head.” A different kind of spine.

Same constraint, different reason for it

Here’s what’s funny about watching the rest of the industry catch up now: it’s the same human-gated relay race, wearing a different excuse. Back then, the block was regulatory. Cold outbound simply wasn’t allowed. Today, the block is behavioral. Cold outbound is technically allowed in the US (or wherever there’s opt-in), and everyone’s doing it. Check your own spam folder or your LinkedIn DMs. It’s noise. It doesn’t work anymore. Same constraint, different reason for it.

I don’t know exactly what Korean privacy regulations look like today. They were already strict when my team was navigating them years ago. Regulation, unlike most things in this industry, only moves in one direction. It doesn’t relax. Data privacy rules have been tightening for a decade, market after market, and that isn’t about to reverse.

Layer that onto a world that keeps getting smaller and more automated. AI compressing distance. Automation compressing headcount. Everyone reachable, and everyone regulated in different ways. What looked like a regional nuance back then reads like an early signal now. The constraints the market put on my team weren’t an edge case. They were a preview.

So what is headless actually becoming?

Not fewer people doing cold outbound. That was never it. Headless is what happens when the brand does the reaching. You say plainly what you do and who you are, you publish it at a scale no rep could ever cover, and you let the machines carry it. The buyer doesn’t find you because someone dialed them. They find you because the AI they asked put you in front of them.

That’s why we have already published more than 100,000 pages. Not just for people to browse. For models to read. Fundamentally it’s about building utility, clarity, and usefulness. Not noise, not AI slop. Not arbitrarily gating content, but real value. We just got started, and we’re working on expanding it.

Not an engineer. A conductor.

This changes what GTM needs to do, and it’s where I think the industry has the title wrong. “GTM engineer” is sticky, and I get the appeal. But the word engineer undersells it. An engineer builds the thing. What these people actually do is build it AND time it. Practice, iterate, orchestrate, and understand the context, not just the process. They cue the data, the content, the model, and the human, and they decide which one comes in when to deliver the context the customer needs. So that GTM adds value at every turn and it makes music. That isn’t an engineer. It’s a conductor.

I just started my doctorate at Thunderbird (ASU), focusing on trust: how it’s built, broken, and, most importantly, quantified. Not how we talk about it in a positioning deck or an employee culture meeting. Really measuring it.

Watching my team solve this in real time, years before “headless” had a name, is a lot of why I ended up asking the question in the first place. The through-line from that saturated, tradition-honoring market to what’s happening in GTM today is the same finding, dressed differently: trust isn’t a top-of-funnel input you buy with reach, and it isn’t a rep’s personal asset either. It’s a compounding asset the company builds and keeps, one earned interaction at a time. It’s also genuinely hard to fake at scale, which is exactly why “at scale” was never really the goal. Relevance was.

That’s the piece I’d add to Malcolm’s metaphor. The horseman isn’t headless because he lost something. He’s headless because he never needed the parts everyone else carries around out of habit: the rep who won’t let go of the Rolodex, the script, the volume, the stale slide deck, the spray-and-hope, the signals that were only ever noise.

What the headless horseman does need

What the headless horseman does need, and what most GTM orgs skip because it’s harder to automate than an email cadence:

• A value proposition sharp enough to survive a “so what” from a skeptical buyer, not just from a sales leader in a pipeline review
• Permission architecture instead of a suppression list: earning the right to show up, rather than managing who’s opted out of being shown up to
• Reach the company actually owns, not reach that leaves when a rep does
• The discipline to kill anything (a feature, a message, a channel) that can’t answer the “so what” test
• Context to deliver all of the above in the way the business, the customer, and the buyer need

I didn’t build that spine. My team did. My job was to give them the space to think differently.

And they didn’t build it because they were visionary. They built it because the market took every easy option off the table. Constraint did the work that strategy usually takes credit for.

Most GTM orgs still have the easy options. Cold outbound is legal. The lists are cheap. The cadence tool is already paid for. That’s the problem. Nothing is forcing the harder build, so nobody makes it, and everyone keeps riding a horse whose head quit a long time ago.

You don’t need a regulator to take the shortcut away. You can just stop taking it.

So what would your GTM look like if cold outbound were banned tomorrow? Go build that one.

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