Thomas Gaydos

Every few weeks I get on a call with a founder who has sent me a deck ahead of time, and I open it up and I can see everything they know sitting right there on the slides. The technology is real, the market is real, the numbers hold up. Somewhere around slide four I realize I have no idea what I am supposed to feel about any of it, which means an investor is going to have the same problem, except they will never tell you about it. They'll nod politely through the pitch and then go quiet...

A 'what works for sales and marketing in 2026' field guide for agencies, system integrators, and software companies selling into medium and enterprise accounts. Most enterprise technology deals are won or lost before a salesperson ever joins the conversation. By the time a buying group agrees to a meeting, they have usually researched the category, built a shortlist, and ranked a favorite. That single reality should reorganize how you spend your marketing and sales budget.

Your website has a new visitor. It doesn’t browse your homepage, doesn’t scroll through your testimonials, and couldn’t care less about your hero image. It never fills out a contact form. But it’s deciding, right now, whether your brand gets recommended to millions of people. That visitor is a large language model, an LLM, and the way it “sees” your website looks nothing like the way your customers do. What’s happening is that a new discovery channel has emerged alongside traditional search...