What 300 GTM leaders are betting on

Hey friends, every year someone declares outbound dead, and every year the people saying it still have an SDR team.

This year the data is a bit more specific. Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje asked 300 GTM leaders what's working, and the answer on outbound came back split in two. One version is “dead”. The other is the thing a lot of them plan to spend more on next year.

In today’s Circuit:

🛠️ Operator Tip of the Week
📖 What 300 GTM leaders said about outbound, AI and what's next
💡 Tool Spotlight
📡 Across The Wire
🧪 Worth trying this week

🛠️ Operator Tip of the Week

Take the last 50 accounts your team emailed and write down why each one was picked that week. If the honest answer for most of them is "they matched the ICP filter", you're running list-based outbound.

If you can point to something that changed at the account in the last 30 to 90 days, like a new sales leader, a job post, a funding round or a tool switch, that's a signal.

Most teams find the split is a lot more list than they thought, and it's a quick way to see where the next sequence should start.

📖 Main story: the two kinds of outbound

Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged) and Maja Voje (GTM Strategist) just published their 2026 State of B2B GTM report. They surveyed 300 GTM leaders at software and AI companies in September, from pre-$1M ARR startups up to companies past $50M.

It's self-reported, so it tells you what teams are doing and planning more than what's paying off, but at 300 responses it's one of the better reads on where budgets are heading.

The channels that actually carry the load

The most common core channels were network and introductions (62%), SEO (51%) and founders and employees posting on LinkedIn (50%).

AI search, getting your product recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and the rest, is now core for 39% of teams, up 11 points from last year, the biggest jump of any channel. Founder-led sales is still the leading motion overall, and it's the runaway one under $1M ARR at 44%.

So for a lot of companies the pipeline still comes from who they know and what they publish.

Cold outreach, officially oversaturated

The report's own summary: "Cold outreach is officially oversaturated, and AI SDRs aren't living up to the early hype." Cold calling came last on the list of channels teams plan to invest more in. That lines up with what most inboxes look like right now.

When AI made it cheap to send a lot more email, plenty of teams did exactly that, and buyers started tuning all of it out. Outbound still matters for bigger deals, though. Companies selling deals over $50k picked outbound as their main motion more than anything else (31%), and it's 25% for deals between $5k and $50k.

Signal-based outbound is the bet

The same survey that calls cold outreach saturated also has signal-based outbound as the most common experiment teams are running: 50% are trying it.

Looking ahead to 2027, 48% plan to invest more in it, second only to AI search at 50%. Salesforge's Frank Sondors, one of the report's partners, put it as "Go wide to stay known. Spearhead to close."

Advertising and content cast the wide net, and outbound only fires when a signal says the timing is right.

Which signals teams actually use

This one might be surprising to some. The signals teams act on today are mostly their own: content engagement (52%), website visits (42%) and product usage (40%).

Third-party signals sit much lower, with social activity at 30%, champion movements at 28%, hiring activity at 25% and leadership changes at 24%.

First-party signals only reach people who already know you. Third-party ones, like hiring, leadership changes or a champion moving to a new company, can point to accounts that haven't found you yet, and today fewer teams act on them.

What a signal-based setup looks like

Stripped down, most of these setups run the same five steps.

Catch a signal that makes your offer urgent. Check the company against your ICP and a block list of who should never get emailed. Find the person who owns the problem and verify their work email. Write the first line about what changed, since that's the reason they'd reply.

Keep the sequence short and stop the moment someone answers. The specific signals, filters and tools change from company to company. The order mostly doesn't.

AI is everywhere, except where it was supposed to be

43% of respondents now say AI has a big impact on their GTM, up from 24% last year, and Claude jumped from fourth to first as the most impactful GTM tool, named by 110 people.

Yet AI SDRs are the part the report says hasn't delivered. Our read: AI is doing well at the research, enrichment and drafting work around outbound, and still struggling when it's handed the whole job.

One respondent summed it up: "AI is used for everything right now. But there's no AI that actually generates SQLs consistently."

💡 Tool Spotlight

Sumble builds company data from job posts and other public sources, so you can see which companies are hiring for specific roles and which tools they use.

The fit: hiring activity is one of the third-party signals only a quarter of teams act on, and a company posting for SDRs or a RevOps lead has told you in public what it's working on.

The catch: a job post tells you about a priority and says nothing about budget, so it works best as the first filter, with ICP checks and a human look before anything gets sent. It's also one of the report's partners, so take its prominence in the report with that in mind.

📡 Across The Wire

The full report behind today's main story: Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje's 2026 State of B2B GTM, a September survey of 300 GTM leaders at software and AI companies on which channels they rely on, what they're testing and where they plan to spend in 2027. Read here

Unify says signal-triggered outbound on its platform gets replied to 73% more often than cold sending. It's their own data and they don't share the sample, so treat it as a vendor number. Kyle's survey only shows where teams are heading, not reply rates. Read here

Unify's "Anatomy of an Outbound Email" report looked at 25M+ sends and found personalization grounded in real research got 57% more replies than generic templates. Mail-merging a first name doesn't count. Read here

ICONIQ's State of Go-to-Market 2026, built on data from 150+ B2B software GTM leaders, shows sales cycles dropping from a 25-week peak in 2025 to 19 weeks in 2026. Contract lengths are shrinking too, so it's not all good news. Read here

Level Equity's 2026 GTM insights from its portfolio companies: 29% already generated pipeline from LLMs, which backs up the AI search jump in Kyle's report. Read here

🧪 Worth trying this week

- Tag your last 50 outbound accounts as "signal" or "list", note which signal it was for the signal ones, and pull reply rates per group from your sequencer. If the signal group doesn't reply better, the signal is probably too broad.

- Pick one signal that fits your offer and answer three things before pulling any accounts: why it makes your offer relevant right now, how long it stays fresh (a website visit goes stale in days, a new leader in a few months), and who at the account owns the problem. Then pull 20 accounts that hit it.

- Write the first line for those 20 so it names the change and why it matters to them, in one sentence. Quick test: if the same line would work for an account without the signal, rewrite it.

- Write down 5 questions a buyer asks before choosing a tool in your category, run them in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, and note which sources each answer cites. Those pages (review sites, comparison posts, Reddit threads) are the ones worth getting onto.