Breen Eitel, Co-Founder, GTM Align
Before your team builds another AI workflow, choose the work worth sharing.
A seller finds a repetitive task, builds a shortcut and shows the team. It looks useful. Then you learn the experiment consumed a week while prospecting stopped.
John Eitel described a similar AI rollout at Orum to Jason Bay on Outbound Squad. One seller built several tools, including shortcuts for work an existing product already handled. John saw useful ideas, an opportunity cost and a missing starting point from leadership.
Hear John's full conversation with Jason Bay on Outbound Squad. The rollout discussion begins around 19 minutes. This is John's operating experience at Orum, not a GTM Align client result. The exercise below is our application of that discussion.
Choose the work before the tool
Start with one repetitive task and a recent example. Record the inputs, useful output, user and cost of a wrong answer. Include checking and corrections. Then check whether a setting, template or removal of the task would solve the problem more simply.
Repeated work with similar inputs and a clear acceptance standard may suit a shared workflow. A first account brief might fit. Responding to a buyer's unstated concern needs more seller judgment.
- Explore personally: a bounded experiment that does not alter shared records or contact buyers without review.
- Test for the team: repeated work with defined inputs, a named owner and an output people can check.
- Fix or remove first: work that exists because the source data, decision or handoff is unclear.
Run one small test
Use this brief for one candidate. The account-brief example is illustrative, not a reported customer engagement.
- Task and user
- Prepare an account brief for a rep's first conversation.
- Inputs and output
- Use approved company pages and CRM facts. Produce a short sourced brief with open questions.
- Human decision
- The rep checks the facts, decides whether the reason for contact holds up and approves any message.
- Owner and boundary
- Name one maintainer. The workflow drafts; it does not send outreach or overwrite account records.
- Comparison and stop condition
- Compare similar briefs made manually and with the workflow. Count setup, checking, corrections and upkeep. Pause if the source trail fails or repair outweighs the benefit.
Set a review date and a fallback for wrong results. A small successful test can justify another test. It does not prove company-wide productivity or more pipeline.
Make one decision
Pick one task. Keep it with the rep, test it as a shared workflow or fix the underlying process first. Name the owner and the evidence you will review.
If work is waiting on your permission rather than a tool, use the founder decision-audit worksheet to define what someone else can decide and when they should bring you in.
For a specific workflow, bring a recent example to a 30-minute GTM Diagnostic with me, Breen Eitel. We will examine the evidence and discuss what deserves investigation or change next. If further work makes sense, we scope it separately.
Book a GTM Diagnostic