B2B Copy That Actually Sells

Generic messaging is dead; learn the new wedge playbook and why trust is the last moat.

Author

Tyler Morian
July 17, 2025

This week: AI-native GTM teams cutting 38% headcount since 2022, the full-on death of generic B2B messaging, and a founder who literally burned his SaaS to chase crypto. Plus the rise of the "Agent Manager" (...it's happening). Giddyup!

The New Economics of SaaS

Lean is the new law.

A quiet reset is under way: 16-week-old startups now run with 50% fewer people than in 2022. That's not a layoff cycle—it's an operating-model change. Usage-based pricing (think Anthropic, $0 → $4 B ARR in three years) finally divorces revenue from headcount.

For CMOs, this flips the classic motions. Pricing shifts from seats → tokens, marketing budgets are pegged to GPU queries, and the finance team now sits in your stand-up. If your LTV model lacks a "$0.002 per prompt" line, you're building an unprofitable funnel on purpose.

BIG IDEA Unit economics are moving from predictable seats to volatile usage velocity.

WHY IT MATTERS A GTM engine that ignores COGS per query is doomed to outrun itself.

Comment insights

  • Byrne Hobart ties usage tiers to video-game leveling—an instant framework for tiered pricing.

  • High Alpha finds 41% of SaaS firms now monetize AI directly; most are finishing the shift before next renewal cycle.

  • Tier One Insights predicts "pure seat-based SaaS" won't clear 2026 renewals without a hybrid twist.

38% Leaner GTM Teams — Without Losing Growth

AI lets one marketer do the work of a 2019 team of five.

Lemkin's latest SaaStr piece shows AI tools shaving 38% staff from top-of-funnel roles. SDR bots fire off thousands of hyper-personalized emails—then crash stale leads back to life. In one test, four "dead" contacts booked $50k meetings within 48 hours.

But the human piece grows heavier. That same AI SDR required daily prompt-patching, data-wrangling, and escalation rules. The bottleneck isn't headcount: it is orchestration talent. If your PMM can't run a 3-hour prompt-tuning sprint, the AI writes better copy than quarterly planning.

BIG IDEA AI is leverage, not labor substitution; 10× output demands 2× smarter systems design. 

WHY IT MATTERS Hiring budgets shift from executors to prompt engineers, data janitors, and behavior analysts.

Comment insights

  • Christopher Penn shows how to mine 10-K filings with RAG—exactly the new orchestration muscle CMOs need.

  • Nate's Newsletter notes 16% of buyers now pull vendor spreadsheets through ChatGPT during discovery—optimize for LLMs, not SEO.

The B2B Playbook Was a Mirage

When the funding ends, generic drivel fails.

Missteps laid bare: the "old playbook" only looked brilliant while VC cash floated every CAC above $20. 68% of buyers say vendors sound identical—because they all chased the same boiler-plate persona pages.

The new framework is ruthlessly clear: explain your one wedge unmistakably or be replaced by the next tab. Robert Kaminski calls for "obvious, not clever" copy. Consistency beats clever, retention > acquisition, and niche positioning outruns feature parity.

BIG IDEA Trust is the only moat; coherence across every touchpoint is the new growth hack. 

WHY IT MATTERS CMOs can't fix messaging with a copy tweak—they must architect narrative from ad to renewal.

Comment insights

  • Dale W. Harrison argues B2B basket size makes funnel math different—5-seat vs 50k-seat deals can't share a CAC model.

  • Pam Didner suggests marketers adopt rev-quotas tied to pipe velocity, replacing fluffy MQL metrics with real downstream impact.

The Rise of the Agent Manager

IT budgets are quietly minting new org titles.

Box's Aaron Levie watched IT leaders hire not new reps, but "Agent Managers"—people who wrangle squads of AI bots before any layoffs hit humans. The job: prompt engineering, data stewardship, and "human-in-the-loop" exception handling that never clocks out.

Marc Benioff warns AI has no empathy, making orchestration the premium skill. Yet Tom Tunguz predicts a single manager will supervise dozens of agents—provided the company first cleans its messy internal processes. The meta task: automate after fixing the mess, not the other way around.

BIG IDEA AI is system augmentation; human orchestration unlocks 10× ROI. 

WHY IT MATTERS CMO hiring profiles must evolve from "can use HubSpot" to "can train and troubleshoot 5 live prompt engines per quarter."

Comment insights

  • Dan Martell sees attitude > code ability; fastest learners become irreplaceable when skills shift.

  • a16z notes 24-year-old "AI-native" talent is teaching 500-person firms how to move at startup speed.

Sound Bites

  • 🎙️ Santosh Sharan on Zeer AI: Forecasts a next-gen SaaS world with fewer unicorns but more deca-corns and armies of profitable niche mini-brands.

The takeaway is plain: leaner, louder, and orchestrated beats bigger, noisier, and bloated. If your 2026 budget relies on adding headcount instead of adding AI orchestrators, the gap between promise and profit only widens.

Until next week!