General Episode Description:In Part 2 of this Selling Intelligence conversation, John Tecce, Vice President of Growth at 2X, explores what the next generation of go-to-market organizations will actually look like as AI, automation, and human expertise continue to converge.John explains why the future isn’t about replacing people with AI, but combining human judgment with agentic workflows to create faster, more adaptive revenue teams. He shares how organizations can break down departmental silos, rethink traditional operating models, and shift from fixed headcount to more flexible, scalable growth strategies.The discussion also dives into practical examples using platforms like Gong and Clay, why most AI initiatives stall before delivering business value, and how today’s revenue leaders can prepare their organizations for a fundamentally different way of working.What You’ll Learn:Human Agentic GTM: What human agentic go-to-market really means and why software, services, AI, and people are converging into one operating model.AI Plus Human Judgment: How platforms like Gong and Clay become exponentially more valuable when combined with human oversight and intelligent workflows.Breaking Down Silos: Why sales, marketing, RevOps, and customer success must operate as one revenue organization instead of separate departments.Rethinking the Operating Model: How leaders should evaluate what to own internally, what to outsource, and where automation creates the greatest leverage.Leading Through AI Transformation: The organizational, operational, and cultural changes required for companies to successfully adopt AI at scale.Key Topics:Human agentic go-to-market strategyAI workflows powered by Gong and ClayGo-to-market engineering and automationConverting fixed headcount into flexible operating modelsCross-functional revenue team alignmentAI adoption challenges and organizational changeJobs-to-be-done operating model designThe future of GTM leadershipGuest Spotlight: John TecceJohn Tecce is the Vice President of Growth at 2X, where he helps B2B organizations modernize their go-to-market strategies through the combination of AI, automation, and human expertise. He works with enterprise leaders to build scalable revenue operating models that improve efficiency, accelerate growth, and prepare organizations for the next generation of GTM execution.Resources & Mentions:2XGongClayClaudeChatGPTAWSMicrosoft AzureSnowflakeDatabricksTrevor Moawad’s work on neutral thinking🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of AI, sales, and go-to-market strategy. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Mark Petruzzi

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. If you're joining for the first time, this is part two of our conversation with John Tesey, Vice President of Growth at 2X.KK Anderson

In part one, we got into why digital outbound has hit a wall and why the BDR to AE model is collapsing and what they've done at 2X to remedy that and how they're working with their customers to overcome it. We talked a lot about how we're back to old school with sending things like in-person Vino letters and how we can build our new go-to-market engine so that we're harnessing on what is human and how wecombat the trust recession. It's an excellent session. Please go back and listen to it.Mark Petruzzi

In this half we get into what human agentic go to market actually means in practice, how 2x is helping clients turn fixed headcount into flexible spend, and what every CRO can do before they buy another tool. John, let's pick it back up.KK Anderson

All right, welcome back John.John Tecce

Thanks for having me back.KK Anderson

2X just called itself the first human-agentic go-to-market services firm. Really cool. Unpack that for us. What does human-agentic actually mean in terms of how work gets done on a client engagement? And tell us, tell us more.John Tecce

Let's start with the humanagentic and then we'll go into go to market. So humanagentic, what you're seeing across the board right now is software and services are converging. and there's been this sort of hard line between like what are we doing with tech and we're bringing in tech and it was a very linear process. We're gonna buy the tool and then we're gonna later either buy the services or figure out the operating model for how to operationalize the tool. And it was verysort that waterfall style of things and and as you were buying more tech and tools, you were sort of trying to layer on the the skill set and operating model. And really at this point, and and arguably before this point, but certainly now, what we're finding is the customer doesn't care whether it's technology or product or people that's getting the work done. They care, are you getting the work done? And is there a human accountable to that work getting done? And so as a as an organization, we have now you know we've pioneered the marketing as a service space.Starting about about a decade ago with the formation of 2X and the creation of that category. And then as we've seen this shift, and we'll get into go-to-market shortly here, but into how work gets done, and and most of our clients are trying to accomplish growth at the fastest possible and lowest possible cost way, this humanogenic way of getting the work done really is the the path forward and is the the killer app of this generation, if you will. And then from a go-to-market standpoint, what we've seen is the convergence ofThe last probably two decades, we've seen the bifurcation of marketing, sales, and the customer office, right? with the establishment of, as we talked about before, the BDR function is the go-to-market and the handoff, and now the client office with CSMs and account managers. And what we've found is sort of a back to the future moment where everybody realized the customer is at the center of this, whether it's a prospective or current customer, we're all using the same tech, we're all using the same data, and we're all responsible for driving growth for the company.So why are we operating in these silos when really at the end of the day, we're all trying to drive towards a revenue target? So we've found that the convergence of software and services, along with this conversion of go-to-market, you've seen a lot of GTM titles lately that have popped up as a result, have led to this moment where human and AI are able to effectively deliver upon that, while at the same time there's less of a concern at a siloed level of on the client side who owns it. They all own growth.Mark Petruzzi

So John, two of two X's top partnerships are gong and clay. Walk us through a specific use case where the combination of these tools with human judgment produces an outcome that neither can produce alone.John Tecce

Yeah, so it's interesting. with most enterprise data is unstructured. It's in emails, it's in Slack messages, it's in video transcripts, it's in these Gong transcripts, right? and so we we acquired a a top implementation partner of Gong last year, outbound funnel, with in mind this convergence that we talked about. We were in marketing as a service, as a category, we created it, we've led it for a while. we saw this convergence happening, said, hey.There's so much richness from a go-to-market standpoint that is in Gong transcripts. While at the same time, Gong themselves have also gone through a convergence in RevTech and moved into with like Gong Engage, right? And being able to become a full full platform revenue provider. And so we we kind of saw this happening. And then at the same time, we saw the emergence of go-to-market engineering with clay as the as the primary platform there in terms of data enrichment. as you both know, and I'm sure all the listeners know, the number one hindrance toscale personalized outbound is data, hygiene and cleanliness, as well as the ability to then activate it with with agentic workflows. And so we acquired Clay's largest partner earlier this year as well. And so when you think about that combination of things, you're looking at a place where, hey, we have the ability to now synthesize prospector client transcripts, right? And we have the ability to then and drive better segmentation hygiene andagentic activation of contact data. And so you're in a place now where the future vision you can look forward and say, well, wait a minute. There's a very simple way for us to take, for example, a a conversation had at 9 a.m. you know with a with a prospect and that transcript can be synthesized by a commercial intelligence platform maybe like known while for example two extras acquired but the the concept remains hey we can synthesize that even just an AE could look at it and say cool wait a minute I could go flagto a go-to market engineer in my organization who could use clay to then immediately enrich and say, okay, client mentioned these three things. Well, do we have contact data for the people at the company that would own those things? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe it's unclean. All right, well if we could update that and then we could use clay to run an out an automated outbound play to them about a product or service that they mentioned on this call, right? Now you're looking at the same type of effect thatIn B2C, we always joke that our devices are listening to us, right? All of a sudden you see you get served an ad for something that was mentioned. To be clear, I'm not promising any of that any means. all of what we just talked about is sort of art of the possible and systems architecture work with with agents and and humans involved. But that's the type of thinking when we think about go to market, we think about where does a gentic play in, where do where do off-the-shelf tools like Gong and Clay kind of come in. And that's the exciting a lot of the conversations we're having with our clients right now around, okay, I've made investments in these tools.KK Anderson

Mm-hmm.John Tecce

But also I know I need to build out with Agentik and I know I need a human in the mix. how do we do that? And and as a firm, we are in that human agentic world to be able to help.KK Anderson

So to be able to do that, you can't have a world where you're operating in silos. It's all cross-functional workflows that, it just feels very different than what we all learned in business school.John Tecce

And how the organizations are structured. That's the other th part that I think we've noticed is a lot when you talked about operating model earlier, a lot of organizations were okay, well, RevOps owns Gong and marketing has the marketing automation platform and Clay was brought in by somebody and and hey, we're all messing around with Claude or Chat GPT and having to to organizationally bring everybody together to start to make those decisions together, it's a forcing function for that to start to happen.It's been a very interesting exercise over the last couple of months as as everybody's starting to think through what this agentic future looks like.KK Anderson

So, and like in just another example that a client of ours is working through with agencies, Gong picks up a CSM talking about a potential upsell or cross-sell, and then it immediately fires off an email to the AE saying, hey, this just happened, like it's live. Call them now, right? There's so many different things they could do. So with your clients who arebuilding the art of the possible and I know it's all happening in real time and it's new and not a lot have, right? Not a lot, there's not a lot of frontier organizations out there truly that have gone past just using Claude and GPT. Like what are some best practices around orchestrating these kinds of things? Is it just another, is it another platform or another tool that you're using that's gonna hold all of these agents in these workflows or like what does that look like?Like when you're, and I guess my last question is, when you're talking to clients about these things, like what, what kind of objections do they have? Like where does it break? Like where does this human agentic like model, I don't know. Tell me what you think.John Tecce

Yeah.I'll start with the latter. Where does it where do the conversations break? The first one is in very similar to a decade or a decade and a half ago when the IT part of the organization was navigating the shift from on-premises storage and compute to cloud-based storage and compute with AWS and Azure and later Snowflake and Databricks. it's the same conversation about fixed cost to variable cost.KK Anderson

Mm-hmm.John Tecce

We are seeing that as a organizations are not currently prepared to, especially in go-to-market, break the predictability of their CAC or of similar metrics of understanding, okay, well, what is this gonna cost me? Everybody is aware of the ceiling of AgenTic and of these operating models and the flexibility and tools like clay that are consumption-based and token tokens are the big topic right now, cost of tokens and governance.KK Anderson

Right.John Tecce

And the first thing that happens is everybody realize, whoa, okay, wait a minute. We might be limited in our our ability and our output right now, but we also have cost predictability. And so what I think the number one thing that's holding back most organizations in this way is is that conversation. And then the unknown, exactly. The unknown and just the the the very way that they account for customer acquisition cost, for sales productivity cost, a lot of a lot of those measures.Mark Petruzzi

Yeah.KK Anderson

The unknown.John Tecce

So that's I think the first thing. I think the second thing does become a very boring but necessary conversation about accountability, races, SLAs. Okay, well, as we're building this out, the big difference between the peers in the IT organization and the go to market organization is when IT was making this decision, they had visibility to their workloads. That's how it works in IT, right? You can see, okay, these jobs are passing through the server to the compute. We havethe it's all metric, right? It's all there. You had IT tickets and SLAs and things like that. Go to market organizations do not have workflow visibility. They do not typically have strong SLAs. and that's one of the key core components to anything that is going to be agentic by nature is understanding what is who is accountable for what. what is the baseline? And are we just smashing the AI button because I saw somebody on LinkedIn say they automated an entire thing with Claude over the weekend.Or are we actually trying to solve a problem against a meaningful baseline? And I found that most organizations do not have a baseline within which to measure. And their AI mandate is just, I don't know. I see everybody else on LinkedIn doing all this cool stuff, and you know, we should be doing it too. I feel like we're behind. and so that's often where I think I see it break the last of the three would be kind of a related point but the o the political ownership of it. well, hey,The the revenue office, they signed the clay contract and we're marketing and we can't really, you know, that's that's their licenses, that's not my licenses, right? Or hey, sales ops owns the gong instance, and we can't really, you know, it's a pain and whatever. And so there's a lot of those political realities and organizational dynamics that we are finding, especially as you'd imagine, the further up market you move in the enterprises.But there is a lot of that technical operational and organizational debt that's getting in the way of those conversations. the ones that we're seeing move the fastest right now, of course, are more blank slate in nature, but not, you know, are yeah, we're seeing like, you you're seeing the startups and the and the solopreneurs move fast because they got no other that that's what they're they can do. But that like, you know, 300 to thousand person, you know, B2B SaaS organization, right? Where there's they're well funded enough to be able to make the investments, but they're not hampered by a lot of that organizational.at that are really able to make those decisions of hey, I don't need to go hire three more people. I don't need to bring in more tools in a monolithic way. I just need to go like build out in this agile way. Those are the ones that I'm seeing the most that are able to move the fastest.Mark Petruzzi

Great. All right. Well, let's move to our final topic with John. The operating model rethink, what to own, what to outsource, and how to decide. So John, you described the conversation you are having with clients right now about converting fixed headcount into flexible spend. Walk us through how that conversation starts and what's the core question that opens it up.John Tecce

Typically the core question is some type of organizational mandate. Everybody needs to grow. Everybody wants that the growth is always a target, right? But the question is, are we is our operating model aligned with growing to that rate in any realistic way? Right. And if the answer is yes, then great. You can probably make incremental improvements and iterations to get there.If the answer is no, our operating model is not physically or operationally aligned with getting to that growth target. Okay, we need to rethink this. our our position on this is there's really kind of three layers to thinking through it. And this comes from our our CMO, Lisa Cole, who put out a book recently on this exact topic around what what you need to own, what and and from our perspective, that's what you need to be the best in the world at. Those are your differentiated for your organization capabilities that only you can deliver in a best in class way. And a lot of times that requiresdeep corporate knowledge, deep market knowledge, segment knowledge, those type of things. So think brand strategy, think product marketing strategy from a CRO standpoint, targeting, the pricing and packaging, like things that don't you can outsource getting help on, and you should probably get get advisory on that, but you need to own those decisions in-house.What we found, and most organizations have found, is the vast majority of the jobs to be done that don't fit that category can very easily be outsourced and or automated. And I think the and or is really the key here. A lot of organizations are also thinking through: okay, I have a cost reduction mandate, I have a growth mandate, and then I have an AI mandate. How the hell do I thread that needle? our perspective is ultimately if you are locked up in fixed headcount.which most organizations are at a pretty high level, you are not in a position to have that sort of slider on this on the jobs to be done to the AI component. You can DIY it, but it's going to take you longer, which is going to then distract you from your current growth target. It's also probably not going to get you to the point you need to get to from a cost reduction standpoint. So our position is to look at that as a jobs to be done exercise and then be able toset your operating model up in a way that allows you with that slider flexibility to to automate or not automate. Maybe we go too far with automation and then hey, all right, we gotta we gotta back that out, right? versus if you make if you're absent that flexibility, you're in a pretty tough position in this currently a very dynamic market. so those are kind of the the way we we help clients think through it. and of course self servingly probably recommend to to find a partner from a humanogenic services perspective toKK Anderson

Sure. Absolutely. And last question before we move into the rapid fire questions, which we know is everyone's favorite. So you are inside a firm that's actively building the model that, as we've chatted about, most CROs are still trying to understand. So what would you say is the single most common mistake that you see leaders making?when they're trying to rethink their operating model and what does the version that actually works look like? Where would you point someone to get started on?John Tecce

I think the most common mistake is is unfortunately at the human level of not accepting sooner how different the operating models will be going forward and needing to make tough decisions to get there. And that's a that's a that's a difficult conversation to have across the board in terms of oflooking at your operating model, looking at your work structure, looking at how you built the organization, understanding that decisions that were made even prior to February of this year when Claude Cowork went generally available. We're in a fundamentally different world in June of 2026 than we were even in February or March. And not, you know, there are emotions tied to that obviously, but also being having the pragmatism of understanding thatKK Anderson

Wow.John Tecce

reality and then being able to act accordingly. you know, that's it's hard. That's that's probably the hardest thing. And it's hard to even call it a mistake at a human. I have a team. I love my team. and and and the organization around us as well. But at the same time, you know, as companies continue to transform, like having that vigilance and not viewing January 2026 as recent, I think is probably the biggest one.Mark Petruzzi

Yeah.KK Anderson

Right.One of the things I would say is that I feel like the product owner may say, yeah, but that's mine. That's product. That's in my lane. But that's a marketing thing. You need to go talk to the marketing person about that. That's a sales thing. The second they start thinking in these departmental silos, that's, I think, where the first mistake is. It is so hard to.And that's really the job of today's CEO is how do you break the mindset to where people aren't thinking that? They're not thinking like departments. They're thinking like, cross-functional handshakes.John Tecce

And and I think thinking about the the the okay, well last time I did this, I hired this role and I hired that role and I hired the third role. it's a different world now, right? So even just I see this with go-to-market engineering right now. A lot of people say, we'll just go hire a go-to market engineer. Okay, well that that title hasn't existed for longer than about twelve months. Number one, do you even know what a go-to-market engineer is? And and we're hiring them to do what? To do the AI thing. They're gonna help us build. Okay, well, to do and like starting to get so also defaulting off ofI'm just gonna run the same playbook I've run and maybe I'll just plug in a new fancy title to do it versus fundamentally rethinking how the work gets done, the jobs to be done part of it, and then backing into it that way. I think that's what the you asked about what the version that actually works, the organizations we see that are leading there are the ones that are breaking it down, not by what is the title that's gonna do the work, but the jobs to be done and how do I optimize those jobs to be done.KK Anderson

And are they just taking their C-suite and putting everyone in a room and...battling it out until they figure it out.John Tecce

Seeing more of that than I I've seen certainly in the years that I've been here. number one. Number two, it seems they're they are starting to appoint a VP level person to own them. I was just on with with someone in a private equity back SaaS company this week whose title is VP of Go to Market Transformation. She was in the ops, I think RevOps function prior to that. but they tasked her with, no, you we need to do this and you need to be the cohesive person to go drive this across these organizations.At both an executive alignment standpoint and also a director and functional level alignment standpoint. And so I do see that as well.KK Anderson

Okay, this has been a fabulous interview. Let's do some quick rapid fire. And it does need to be rapid, because I know we've all got hard stops coming. Mark, why don't you kick us off?Mark Petruzzi

All right. So John, what was the first product or service you ever sold?John Tecce

I sold copiers and multifunction printers for Rico in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, not too far from where I'm standing right now.KK Anderson

That's awesome. Who is your favorite CRO or CEO that you follow?John Tecce

Who that I follow. well, I've quite literally followed RCO or Ryan Heineg now to three different jobs. So I have to from a career standpoint, I I guess I have to say him. but I really like a lot of what what Jeremy Donovan puts out for for insight partners. candidly we're insight-backed pork co, so I guess I have to say that, but I do like a lot of his insight.Mark Petruzzi

Huh.KK Anderson

There you go, that's good answer. Ryan Haying.Mark Petruzzi

All right, so a leadership or go to market practice every sales and marketing leader should adopt.John Tecce

mindfulness and at least encouraging some various forms whether it is meditation, whether it is breathing exercises, whether it is therapy, whether it is something like that, perfectionism is something that plagues the B2B sales profession in particular. and viewing a lot of these mental and emotional ways to develop, you know, through that, I think is is paramount.KK Anderson

Wow, I love that. Okay, and my favorite last question, advice you would give your 21 year old self.John Tecce

it's all temporary. Everything is temporary. Every rejection you get, every win you get. to stay neutral, I think, to borrow a a term that I've seen quite a bit of late, from from Trevor Moad, the late Trevor Moad who wrote two books on this topic, but stay neutral, you know, I had a gentleman who I worked directly with who was about twice my age when I started and I'll never forget I was melting down by a customer issue. He's like, You're not even gonna remember the name of that customer in twelve months.You know, at twenty, twenty one, twenty two years old and he was right. So I gotta give him credit for that.KK Anderson

Yeah, yeah.I love it.Mark Petruzzi

John, this has been the kind of conversation our audience needs right now. so thank you for that. An operator who already made the decisions most leaders are still avoiding and who can speak from inside the results. before we let you go, please tell the audience where they can find you in 2x, the firm, the podcast, whatever you want to point them to.John Tecce

all of the above. So you can find us at 2x.marketing, although I believe the dot marketing will change with the convergence of GTM. So we'll stick with 2x.marketing for now. 2x on LinkedIn. you can also find me personally on LinkedIn. My last name is TangoEcho, Charlie Charlie Echo, T-E-C-C-E. There's not many of us. you'll either find me or Michael T C, my father, who does a lot of good stuff on LinkedIn too. So add him while you're there. and and follow all of the above.KK Anderson

Awesome, okay, we will make sure to include all of that in the show notes. John, thank you so, much. This was a genuinely productive two sessions. Thank you.John Tecce

Thank you.Mark Petruzzi

Fromselling intelligence, I'm Mark Petruzzi.KK Anderson