Revenue, Decoded is Airspeed's weekly read for revenue teams who'd rather fix problems than talk about them.
This week:
- The 5 post-demo problems quietly killing your win rate, and what to do about each
- How Jessie, one of our SDRs, qualifies ICP in minutes with an Airspeed agent
- What we heard on the ground at Forrester, plus SaaStr is two weeks away
Jessie qualifies ICP in minutes with an Airspeed agent
Most SDRs burn a chunk of their morning the same way: five tabs open, cross-referencing LinkedIn, the CRM, recent news, and their own notes, trying to work out whether a company is worth reaching out to.
It's not hard work. It's slow work. And it stacks up fast across a full prospect list. Jessie, one of our SDRs, built an agent in Airspeed that does it for her.
She drops in a company name. The agent pulls firmographics, recent signals, and existing CRM data, then returns a clear ICP verdict with the reasoning behind it.
Watch how she built it and what it looks like in practice:
Sales teams spend most of their energy getting to the demo. Then the demo ends, and that is where most deals are actually won or lost.
What happens in the 48 hours after the call matters more than almost anything that happened during it. Here are the five post-demo problems that kill deals most often, and what to do about each.
Losing momentum
You hang up without booking the next meeting. The follow-up goes out the next morning. The prospect had three other vendor calls that afternoon, and your email is now buried under twelve others.
Do this:
→ Book the next call before you hang up, every single time, no exceptions
→ Send your follow-up within 2-4 hours, not the next day
→ Include the recording, a personalized recap, and clear next steps in that email
→ If they say they need to think about it, book a 15-minute check-in for 2-3 days out before you get off the call
How Airspeed helps: Airspeed drafts the follow-up straight from your call (key moments, action items, next steps), so you're not starting from a blank page while you're already onto the next meeting.
Missing decision-makers
You get to the end of the call and realize you've been talking to someone who can't say yes. The deal stalls because the economic buyer was never in the room and nobody mapped who else needs to be involved.
Do this:
→ During the demo, ask directly: "Who else needs to see this before you can move forward?"
→ Identify the economic buyer, technical buyer, and champion before the call ends
→ In your follow-up, propose a meeting that includes the full buying committee
→ Build a mutual action plan with clear owners and deadlines for every step
How AI helps: use Airspeed to build a stakeholder map template for your ICP. Ask it to generate a typical buying committee with likely objections per role. Run it before every deal.
Technical questions you can't answer
Salesforce integration details. SSO requirements. API capabilities. Security protocols. The prospect asks something specific and you guess, overpromise, or go quiet. All three plant doubt.
Do this:
→ Loop in your solutions engineer or technical team in the follow-up email the same day
→ Schedule a technical deep-dive within the week; don't let it float
→ Proactively send documentation, security info, and integration guides before they ask again
→ Never guess or overpromise. "Let me confirm that and get back to you by Thursday" is always the right answer
How Airspeed helps: Airspeed flags the technical questions raised on a call, so nothing falls through the cracks between the AE and the technical team.
Weak discovery, generic demo
You get off the call and realize you never found out what their real problem was. The demo covered everything and landed nothing. The prospect wasn't excited because you never showed them how it solves their situation.
Do this:
→ In your follow-up, name it: "I'd love to go deeper on [specific challenge]; I don't think we got there today"
→ Schedule a second, more tailored demo or a proper discovery call
→ Ask via email: "What would success look like in 90 days for your team specifically?"
→ Use their answers to rebuild the next demo around their use case, not yours
How Airspeed helps: Airspeed's deal pages surface the gaps in your discovery: missing MEDDIC fields, unanswered risk flags, stakeholders not yet identified. Check it before every follow-up.
No urgency, no timeline
The prospect liked it. They're just not moving. No compelling event, no deadline, no reason to decide this month over next. The deal sits in your pipeline looking healthy until it isn't.
Do this:
→ Find or create the urgency: "When do you need this in place to hit your Q3 targets?"
→ Tie it to something they told you: "You mentioned ramping 8 new reps in Q3; let's get this live before then"
→ Offer a pilot or short trial to get them in the product quickly
→ Set a decision date together before you get off the call: "Let's aim to have a decision by X. Does that work for you?"
How AI helps: use Claude to draft a business case document for the champion to take to their exec. Give it the pain points from your discovery, the outcomes they're looking for, and the cost of doing nothing. A champion with a document moves faster than a champion without one.
Phoenix Forrester B2B: what's going on in the GTM world
We just got back from Forrester B2B Summit. Three days on the floor, a lot of booth conversations, and a few themes that came up no matter who we talked to.
Tool overkill is the real execution killer
Everyone agrees AI for GTM is non-negotiable. The problem is the flood of tools: big promises, little guidance on how to actually use them. That holds teams back more than the absence of AI ever did. Most tools add tasks, not clarity.
Thousands of stranded insights sitting in platforms nobody opens help no one execute. There's a lot of room to improve here, and vendors are starting to hear it.
Native AI is having a moment
People are tired of 10-year-old platforms that bolted AI on later and now fight their own UI and any genuinely agentic workflow.
Fake it till you make it has stopped working. The appetite for platforms built AI-first from the ground up has never been louder. Music to our ears.
Human skills are still the headline
Even with AI in every session, the conversations that drew the most energy were about empathy, creativity, and judgment. No coincidence: where AI isn't making humans more effective, it's busy trying to mimic us.
We had a lot of fun in Phoenix. Next stop: SaaStr Annual in two weeks.
If you're going to be there, come find us at booth G115!
- We're heading to SaaStr Annual, May 12-14. Devang, our CTO and Co-Founder, is running a session on Wednesday 12:10-12:20 PM: How to Build GTM Agents That Turn Your Reps' Data Into Pipeline (and 2x Conversion Rates) 🏆
- This week, we gave a listen to Anthropic’s Boris Cherny on building Claude Code, how to maximize AI productivity, and what comes next after coding is “solved"
