IN THIS EDITION
Why the space between knowing what to do and actually doing it is where pipeline quietly dies, plus a closed-lost play our own team is running for a fast Q3, and Adam on the GTMnow podcast.
01 · Deep dive
The promise nobody tracks
"I'll follow up on that." Every rep has said it. It sounds harmless, even responsible. But trace what actually happens after the call ends: the rep has five more conversations lined up, the follow-up joins a list, and that list loses, every time, to the inbox and the day's admin. Three days later, the urgency the prospect felt on the call is gone. Nobody decided that on purpose. It just slipped.
Here's what makes it expensive rather than just annoying: the CRM doesn't know any of this happened. The deal still shows as live and active, because as far as the system is concerned, nothing changed. The manager builds a forecast off that same data. The CRO takes that forecast into a board meeting and has to explain a miss that was actually baked in weeks earlier, by a promise nobody followed through on.
It's tempting to file this under rep accountability. It isn't a discipline problem. The best reps have always been great at the part of the job that can't be automated: reading a champion's hesitation, knowing when to push, building trust that gets a deal unstuck. What kills the follow-up is everything competing for the same 20 minutes between calls: account research, CRM updates, the handover doc, the business case. None of it needs the rep's judgment. All of it crowds out the promise.
That's the execution gap: the space between knowing what to do in a deal and actually doing it. Closing it comes down to three moves:
Capture the commitment the moment it's made. Every "I'll follow up on that" should leave the call as a tracked action with an owner and a deadline, extracted from the conversation itself, not from what the rep remembers to log. If it lives only in someone's head, it's already slipping.
Remove what the follow-up competes with. The CRM update, the follow-up draft, the handover doc: none of it needs a rep's judgment, so none of it should consume the 20 minutes between calls. Automate the admin and the promise stops losing to it.
Pattern-check every live deal against past losses. If a similar deal stalled because nobody looped in the CFO, and this one shows the same shape, that should surface before it becomes a repeat mistake, not in a quarterly one-on-one three months too late.
Do those three things and the forecast stops being a guess, the CRO stops getting surprised in board meetings, and reps spend their time on the part of the job that actually needs a human. Adam went deep on this with Sophie Buonassisi on GTMnow: the Series A, the rebrand, and why the golden age of sales reps is just getting started.
02 · How Airspeed uses Airspeed
The closed-lost play we're running for a fast Q3
Your closed-lost column is the warmest cold pipeline you have: buyers who already knew the problem, took the meetings, and said no for a reason that may no longer be true. Theo Robson, our Business Manager, kicked off our Q3 pipeline push exactly there. The play:
1. Pull every closed-lost deal from the last 12 months over $25k. The threshold matters, you want accounts worth a rep's time, not a mass re-mail.
2. Filter out the true dead ends. Wrong CRM, hard technical blockers, companies that bought a product you don't compete with. What's left is deals lost on timing, budget, or priority, all things that change.
3. Assign five accounts per rep. Five is deliberate: small enough that every account gets real attention, large enough to move pipeline.
4. Let Airspeed do the archaeology. Ask Airspeed pulls why each deal actually died, the objection on the last call, who went quiet, what the champion said, so the re-entry message references the real history instead of opening with "just checking in."
Every rep gets a tracked list, every message is grounded in what actually happened in the deal, and the whole exercise took one morning to set up.
03 · Company news
PODCAST: Adam on GTMnow: from DeepMind to 200 customers
Adam sat down with Sophie Buonassisi on the GTMfund podcast to talk through the execution gap, the Series A, the rebrand, and why the golden age of sales reps is just getting started. Listen to the episode → https://www.goairspeed.com/blog
WEBINAR: Revenue Execution Roundtable: five reps, $50M target, zero enablement function
Our first roundtable ran June 30th with Grant Jessup, Chief Client Officer & SVP at LevelUp HCS, an Airspeed customer since the first ten. Grant runs a five-person global sales team carrying a $40–50M net new target, with no sales enablement function.
His team opens their coaching scorecards every Monday before they open HubSpot, brings their own gaps to one-on-ones, and turns recurring patterns, like next steps slipping at the end of strong calls, into AI training simulations instead of manual role-plays.
The result: they grew year on year while competitors shed 25–30%, without adding headcount.
Catch the recording → https://www.goairspeed.com/webinars
04 · What's coming up
15 JUL: GTM Dinner · San Francisco 20 senior GTM leaders, off the record. Candid conversation about what's actually working in B2B revenue in 2026. Request an invite → https://www.goairspeed.com/events/gtm-dinner-san-francisco
22 JUL: Webinar: Why Your Forecast Is Lying to You 12:00-1:00 PM ET · Live conversation on why forecasts keep missing and what the fix actually looks like. Register → https://www.linkedin.com/events/yoursalesforecastislyingtoyou-h7472283111603687424/theater/
5 AUG: GTM Dinner · Boston Off-the-record dinner for 20 GTM leaders. Real conversation about pipeline, AI, and what's next for sales. Request an invite → https://www.goairspeed.com/events/gtm-dinner-boston
19 AUG: Pavilion Exec August Drinks · London A summer evening with Pavilion Exec members on the Lighterman terrace. Bubbles on arrival, burgers later, no agenda, just good people. Request an invite → https://www.goairspeed.com/events/pavilion-london-august-drinks
