EP 2 - Agents Buying from Agents, The Future of GTM, & More

AI agents are starting to research, compare, and buy on behalf of customers. So how do you build a go-to-market engine when the next buyer might not be human? In this episode, host Todd Sawicki, Co-founder and CEO at Gumshoe, sits down with Mark Roberge, Co-founder of Stage 2 Capital. Mark was the founding CRO at HubSpot, where he helped scale the company's sales organization through its early growth, and he is the author of The Sales Acceleration Formula and The Science of Scaling. Today he invests in and advises go-to-market leaders at startups navigating the AI shift. Todd and Mark discuss whether AI search is the next inbound marketing, why agent-to-agent buying could be the real breakthrough of the AI era, and whether companies are over-investing in AEO / GEO too early. Mark explains why leaders must separate first principles from outdated best practices, how AI is reversing role specialization in sales and R&D, and why experimentation budgets need to grow dramatically. He also shares the "design big, start small" lesson from Amazon's early days, the one sales metric AI can transform right now, and how to break through when AI-generated outreach floods every inbox. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:27 Is AI search the next inbound marketing? 1:10 Agents buying from agents 2:38 How Gumshoe uses AI personas and synthetic users 5:00 Are companies over-investing in AEO / GEO? 8:31 Why no one has the AI playbook yet 8:53 Lessons from HubSpot: start with first principles 12:04 AI is reversing role specialization in GTM 13:27 Building lean go-to-market teams with AI 16:03 Why experimentation budgets need to triple 17:51 Design big, start small: the Amazon lesson 20:49 Sales metrics for the AI era 22:43 Selling time: the metric companies aren't measuring 24:51 Breaking through infinite noise and AI slop 27:18 Wrap-up #AEO #GEO #AISearch #AgenticCommerce #AIAgents #GenerativeEngineOptimization #AnswerEngineOptimization #GoToMarket #SalesStrategy #AIMarketing #StartupGrowth #GumshoeAI