The 2019 GTM playbook — outbound SDR army, MQL waterfall, marketing-led demand gen — was an artifact of free money. It worked because payback periods were forgiven and the next round was always six months away. Both of those assumptions are dead.
The companies still running that playbook in 2026 are not failing dramatically. They are failing quietly, with reasonable-looking dashboards and slowly inflating CAC payback windows that nobody on the board has the appetite to name.
What replaces it
Founder-led sales, all the way through Series B. Narrower ICP. A revenue org that looks less like a funnel and more like account-by-account underwriting. The companies doing this well in SEA right now have GMs, not VPs of sales. The vocabulary change is not cosmetic.
"Founder-led sales is not a stage. It is a permanent capability you choose to keep or lose."
If your last board update used the word 'pipeline' more than the word 'customer', you have already drifted.
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