When is it time to build your AI gtm

Title: When is it time to build your AI gtm?

Read Time: 2.5 min

Today, I wanted to discuss one of the most frequent questions we get asked.

“When is the right time to hire a sales coach?”

Unfortunately, no matter which way I slice it, my response here is going to seem biased, and I’m ok with that. I started this newsletter for two reasons:

(1) I wanted to share and give back to the community.

(2) Most GTM advice being repeated right now is stale SaaS doctrine wearing an AI costume, and it will burn your seed round faster than almost anything else you could do wrong.

I was ostracized for years for refusing to let clients run free pilots, it went against the valley's ethos. I knew that advice was wrong because I'd actually sold things. Paid POCs became one of the biggest needle movers for our clients. Now in the world of deploying AI agents, it’s mandatory. That instinct, don't trust the consensus playbook, trust what actually closes deals, is exactly why the SaaS era rules don't survive contact with AI.

Here's the problem with stealing the old playbook, it was built for a world that no longer exists.

Why the old rules don't apply anymore

The SaaS playbook assumed you had time. Ship, get some usage, iterate, validate, then sell. That sequence worked when your differentiation held for a year or two and your buyer already understood the category they were buying into.

None of that is true in AI.

Your technical edge has a half-life measured in weeks,the next model release or a fast-moving competitor can close your gap overnight. Your buyer usually doesn't understand how to allocate capital for what you're selling yet, so you're not just selling a product, you're selling the existence of a problem worth solving. And your own product is changing under you almost as fast as the market is, which means "validate first, sell later" isn't sequential anymore, it has to happen at the same time, continuously, or you're always selling something that no longer exists.

The new rules of AI GTM

Validation isn't a phase, it's a loop. You don't validate once and move on, you're re-validating the business case every few weeks as the underlying models, costs, and capabilities shift.

You're selling a business case, not a feature. Buyers need the ROI quantified in dollars, hours, or headcount before they'll act, "it's smarter" doesn't close deals, "it saves your team 20 hours a week" does.

Education is now a GTM function. Most of your buyers don't yet know they have the problem you solve. Someone has to build that awareness before a sales conversation is even possible.

Speed to first revenue matters more than speed to feature complete. A rough product with a paying customer beats a polished product with none, the paying customer is your validation, your case study, and your runway extension all at once.

Distribution compounds faster than product does. In a market this crowded, the founder who gets in front of buyers first and fastest usually wins, even against a technically superior product that showed up six months later.

Why building your GTM function early is non-negotiable

This is the part people get wrong. They think deployinf capital towards your GTM is a nice to have. We’ll think about that once we've "figured out the product." In AI, GTM is part of how you figure out the product.

Every one of the new rules above requires a person whose full-time job is running that loop, quantifying the business case, educating the market, closing fast, and feeding what they learn straight back into what you build next. Without that person, founders either stall in build mode chasing a moving technical target, or they burn their raise learning GTM lessons that someone experienced would have already known.

The ROI on getting this right, early, can be the difference between a company that finds its wedge before the round runs out and one that doesn't.

What to look for before you hire

Make sure any sales coach has done what you want to do successfully and has credible case studies or testimonials to back up their work. There are a lot of pretenders out there who have no business coaching and advising. Most sales coaches, in my opinion, are failed salespeople. Make sure you vet them.

• If you have raised a pre-seed / seed round of funding, built an MVP, and are ready to start testing, you're in a good position to hire a sales coach.

• If you have no lead generation or are only generating calls through your friends or your internal network, you can hire a sales coach.

• If you struggle to figure out who your ICP (ideal customer profile) is, you're in a good position to hire a sales coach.

• If you burn through leads that you should've closed and ghosted, you're in a good position to hire a sales coach.

• If you're going through an accelerator that focuses on helping you build and develop your product, you can hire a sales coach. Doing the two concurrently is incredibly powerful.

The decision

AI is moving faster than any market most of us have ever sold in. How quickly do you want to validate that you have built something the market wants, before someone else validates it for you? Do you want to burn through your cash figuring this out alone, or do you want to risk getting passed up by a competitor who moves faster?

Here's the part you don’t want to overlook: right now, everyone has access to roughly the same models, the same tools, the same underlying product.

Customers aren't buying the product anymore, they're buying the sales experience. How you sell it, how well you understand their problem, how clearly you make the case, is the differentiator now, not the tech itself.

If you don't understand that, you're at an incredible disadvantage before you've even started.

How can you come close to definitively knowing that you have something rooted not in speculation but in real user data?

Your answer is when it's time to hire a sales coach.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re a Venture-Backed company interested in coaching, book a call here.

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