Supplement Your Team With Automation & Improve Outcomes with AI As investors in the innovation economy, it is our job to become deeply entrenched in the categories we invest behind to understand the nuances and the dynamics at play at a granular level, while also being able to zoom out and see the broader trends unfolding over years and years. It is with that lens that we offer a final, hopefully informed, industry perspective to leave you with. The bull market that lasted for over a decade has come to an end. Every company – regardless of industry vertical, end customer focus and GTM strategy – is feeling the pressure to reduce costs and grow efficiently. This means that almost every business out there is cutting headcount and reducing spend, but still needing to see growth to sustain and increase value in the long term. That is a complex algorithm and we’ve seen companies most successfully solve it through the intelligent application and integration of software to improve your organization top to bottom. Most organizations are reducing the number of sales reps or SDRs they have – many are reducing both. And while the market will “rebound” and improve over time, we believe this will be a gradual improvement, not a hockey stick-shaped return to normalcy curve. In reducing headcount, companies are looking to supplement their human efforts with software, driving automation for their teams and improving productivity through the intelligent application of AI and other fast- moving technologies (LLMs and Generative AI). In a world where growth is expected and required, but you have less people to drive that growth, software must be seen as an extension of the folks you still have. Choosing the right technology for your organization, and really understanding the value it provides and how to best glean that value to enable your team is what it’s all about. Hopefully, this thought map series shed some light on some of the newer categories of sales tech software we think are valuable, offered a perspective on why we think so, and provided some indicative vendors to look into to get you started on evaluating these technologies yourself. Choose Your Growth Partner Wisely The investment landscape has experienced growth similar to that of the sales tech arena over the last decade. Hundreds of firms, offering billions of dollars of capital have emerged and expanded and there is more money out there than ever before. All investors are selling money, but be forewarned, it is all not the same shade of green. An investor’s capital loss ratio is the percentage of dollars invested that go to zero. Across 50+ partnerships as a firm, we have only lost money once – our capital loss ratio is just over 1%. The industry average is more than 30x that level – 35.4%. This means that if you take money from an - 25 -