The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 104

The State of the GTM Stack: What 50+ B2B Companies Actually Run

Anthony Enrico on a field study read from live systems rather than a survey — and why your headcount picks your CRM

Anthony Enrico · Co-Founder · LeanScale A LeanScale solo episode
Published Updated 00:09:41 8 min read 1606 words
Revenue Operations GTM Strategy Pricing & Packaging AI in GTM
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

Every state-of-the-stack report is a survey — somebody filling in a form describing the stack they wish they had. This one is not. LeanScale runs go-to-market operations inside more than fifty B2B software companies, so Anthony Enrico read the live systems instead: delivery data, projects in flight, hundreds of strategy calls and over fifty customer Slack channels, all anonymised. The panel skews growth stage — mostly Series B and C, mid-market and up, with a heavy tilt toward AI-native, security and fintech — teams with real revenue and a real RevOps function rather than startups still figuring it out.

The headline finding is that the big stack decisions are not decisions. Read fifty stacks side by side and the pattern is gravity rather than strategy: headcount decides the CRM, the pricing model decides whether metering exists, and the stack is far more predictable than anyone selling into it wants to admit. Anthony's reframe is that the useful question is not what your stack should be but which parts are already decided for you and where the actual gap is.

The CRM debate illustrates it. Salesforce is the system of record in 63% of these companies and appears in 72% of stacks; HubSpot is wired into 77%, but using HubSpot and running it as the CRM are different things — for most teams it is the marketing engine beneath a Salesforce system of record, and only about one in five run it as the CRM. Split by size and the argument dissolves: under 200 employees it is a coin flip, past 200 it jumps to 85% Salesforce, and over a thousand it is every single company. Conversation intelligence shows a different shape — about half the panel systematically records and analyses calls, and Gong is nearly 80% of those, which Anthony says means it does not lead the category so much as constitute it.

Two gaps stand out, and both sit where the stack touches money. Twenty-four of the fifty-plus companies price on usage or a hybrid, but only five run real metering infrastructure — an engine that measures consumption and turns it into an invoice. The other nineteen reconcile in spreadsheets and hand-built Salesforce objects. Anthony lived this at Emailage, which closed customers on pure consumption contracts and employed someone specifically to reconcile usage for billing. His illustration is an $8M usage-revenue business invoicing off a hand-updated Google Sheet, where one wrong cell either undercharges your best customer or overcharges them into a churn conversation. The CPQ hole is the same shape: only 21% of the enterprise-selling teams have configure-price-quote, making the layer where deals actually close the one most consistently missing.

Against that, Clay went from not existing four years ago to appearing in 44% of stacks — third on the board, past the incumbents outbound was built on for a decade. Anthony reads it as the market moving from big database, big contract, seven-figure lock-in toward AI-native, composable and affordable. That is the through-line: cheap composable tools spread fast while the expensive systems that touch revenue quietly go unbuilt. Almost every company lives in one of five archetypes, and his advice is to stop fighting decisions already made, look at where the stack touches money, and fix the two or three gaps that actually leak it. For anyone building from scratch, the 176 tools sort into three tiers — with usage metering the single place the market is visibly under-tooled.

Key Takeaways

15 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

This is read from live systems, not a survey

Built from inside more than fifty companies' actual systems — live delivery data, projects in flight, hundreds of calls and over fifty customer Slack channels, all anonymised. Anthony's contrast is that every other state-of-the-stack report asks people to describe the stack they wish they had.

Why it matters: Weight stack research by how it was collected. Self-reported tooling surveys measure aspiration and recall; systems data measures what is wired in.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesFounders
02

Your stack is gravity, not strategy

Reading fifty stacks side by side, the big decisions turn out to be determined rather than chosen. Headcount decides the CRM; the pricing model decides whether metering exists. The same handful of patterns recur, and none of them is what a vendor describes.

Why it matters: Reframe the planning question from what should my stack be to which parts are already decided for me and where is the gap I actually need to fix.

RevOps LeadersRevenue ExecutivesFounders
03

Salesforce versus HubSpot is a headcount question

Under 200 employees it is roughly a coin flip. Past 200 it jumps to 85% Salesforce. Over a thousand employees, every single company in the panel runs it. Anthony's read is that nobody at that size is choosing it out of affection — it is where everyone ends up.

Why it matters: If you are heading past 200 people, stop spending strategy cycles on the CRM debate. It is not a failure of imagination to land where the gravity points.

FoundersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
04

"We use HubSpot" and "HubSpot is our CRM" are different statements

HubSpot is wired into 77% of these companies but only about one in five run it as the CRM. For most it is the marketing engine sitting underneath a Salesforce system of record, which is in 63%.

Why it matters: Adoption figures that do not separate system-of-record from adjacent use will overstate CRM share. Ask which job the tool is doing before reading a number as market share.

RevOps LeadersMarketing Leaders
05

Gong does not lead conversation intelligence, it constitutes it

About half the panel systematically records and analyses sales calls, and Gong is nearly 80% of those companies. Anthony's phrasing is that it basically is the category.

Why it matters: In a category this concentrated, the meaningful decision is whether to do conversation intelligence at all — roughly half these teams still do not — rather than which vendor to pick.

Sales LeadersRevOps Leaders
06

The metering gap: 24 price on usage, five actually meter it

Almost half the panel prices on usage or a hybrid, but only five run real metering infrastructure — an engine that measures consumption and turns it into an invoice. The other nineteen reconcile in spreadsheets and hand-built Salesforce objects, then invoice off that.

Why it matters: Usage-based pricing without metering infrastructure is a manual billing process wearing a modern pricing model. Check whether the pricing decision was ever followed by the systems work it implies.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
07

Every manual step between usage and invoice is a place money falls out

Anthony's illustration is an $8M usage-revenue business where the invoice number comes off a hand-updated Google Sheet. One wrong cell and you have either undercharged your best customer or overcharged them straight into a churn conversation — and most of these teams have a dozen such steps.

Why it matters: Count the manual handoffs between the usage data and the invoice. The risk is symmetric: silent revenue leakage in one direction, an avoidable churn conversation in the other.

Revenue ExecutivesFoundersCustomer Success
08

The pricing model outran the tooling and nobody went back

The move to usage-based pricing happened across a large slice of software in a few years. The billing infrastructure to support it largely did not follow, leaving the gap open at companies with real revenue running through it.

Why it matters: Treat a pricing-model change as a systems commitment with a deadline, not just a go-to-market decision. The gap does not close on its own and grows with the revenue running through it.

FoundersRevenue Executives
09

The CPQ hole sits exactly where deals close

Only 21% of the enterprise-selling teams in the panel have configure-price-quote — the system that turns a deal into a signed number. It is among the most consistently missing layers in the whole stack.

Why it matters: The absence is not random. Expensive systems touching money are under-funded relative to their proximity to revenue, and CPQ is the clearest example.

Sales LeadersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
10

Clay went from nothing to number three in four years

Four years ago Clay barely existed. It is now in 44% of these stacks, third on the board, past the incumbents outbound was built on for a decade.

Why it matters: Read it as a signal about procurement shape rather than about one vendor — the market moved from big database and big contract toward composable tools bought in smaller pieces.

RevOps LeadersMarketing LeadersSales Leaders
11

Cheap composable tools spread; expensive revenue systems quietly go unbuilt

The two findings are the same finding from opposite ends. Affordable, AI-native, composable tooling is everywhere in the panel, while metering and quote-to-cash — the systems that touch money — are where the holes are.

Why it matters: Adoption speed tracks price and ease of purchase rather than proximity to revenue. Budget deliberately against that bias, because nothing in the buying process corrects for it.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
12

Almost every company lives in one of five stack archetypes

The enterprise Salesforce suite; the HubSpot growth stack, an all-in-one default under 200 people; the modern AI-native lean stack, deliberately thin with Clay and a warehouse doing the heavy lifting; the dual CRM in transition, running Salesforce and HubSpot in parallel mid-migration or permanently split after an acquisition; and the consumption stack, usage billing wired to a real metering engine.

Why it matters: From the inside a stack feels bespoke; from outside it is a pattern. Placing yourself in an archetype tells you which gaps are structural to your shape rather than unique to you.

RevOps LeadersFoundersRevenue Executives
13

Fix where the stack touches money, not the shiny new tool

Anthony's operator advice: if you bill on usage and reconcile by hand, that is this quarter's work — the boring spreadsheet sitting between the usage data and the invoice, and the same story for quote-to-cash.

Why it matters: The unglamorous systems touching revenue are exactly the ones nobody funds until they break. Prioritising by visibility systematically defers them.

Revenue ExecutivesRevOps LeadersFounders
14

Three tiers to buy in: table stakes, motion-driven, frontier

All 176 tools sort into tier one — CRM, marketing automation, enrichment — bought at any stage; tier two — sales engagement, CPQ, warehouse, routing — added when the motion demands it; and tier three, the frontier of next-gen CRM, AI agents and usage metering.

Why it matters: Usage metering is the single place the market is visibly under-tooled, which makes it both the clearest gap to fix and the thinnest vendor landscape to fix it in.

FoundersRevOps Leaders
15

The winners are not the teams with the most tools

Anthony's through-line: the teams that do well stopped fighting decisions already made and went and fixed the two or three gaps that actually leak money.

Why it matters: Stack maturity is not tool count. Measure it by whether the paths where revenue moves are instrumented and automated.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
Frameworks Discussed

4 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

Your Stack Is Gravity, Not Strategy

02:03

The large stack decisions are determined by company characteristics rather than chosen — headcount decides the CRM, the pricing model decides whether metering exists.

Derived from reading fifty stacks side by side. The reframe it produces is the practical part: ask which parts are already decided for you and where the real gap is, rather than what the stack should be.

The Five Stack Archetypes

06:33

Enterprise Salesforce suite; HubSpot growth stack (the all-in-one default under 200 people); modern AI-native lean stack (deliberately thin, Clay and a warehouse doing the work); dual CRM in transition (Salesforce and HubSpot in parallel, mid-migration or permanently split after an acquisition); and the consumption stack (usage billing wired to real metering).

Almost every company sits in one or two of them. Anthony's point is that a stack that feels bespoke from the inside is a recognisable pattern from outside, which makes its gaps predictable.

The Three Buying Tiers

08:04

Tier one — CRM, marketing automation, enrichment — table stakes at any stage. Tier two — sales engagement, CPQ, warehouse, routing — added when the motion demands it. Tier three — next-gen CRM, AI agents, usage metering — the frontier.

How the 176 catalogued tools sort for a team building from scratch. Usage metering is called out as the single tier-three category where the market is visibly under-tooled.

Fix Where the Stack Touches Money

07:41

Prioritise the unglamorous systems between revenue and the invoice — metering, quote-to-cash — over more visible tooling, because those are the ones nobody funds until they break.

The operator instruction that follows from the metering and CPQ gaps. Anthony's specific target is the spreadsheet sitting between usage data and the invoice.

Best Quotes

23 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“Not a survey, but actual data from the field. And the stack we found isn't exactly what you see on your LinkedIn feed.”
Anthony Enrico 00:12
“Nobody filled out a form telling us what they wish their stack looked like.”
Anthony Enrico 00:40
“Everybody in RevOps has an opinion about the stack. We get to see what everyone is actually using from the inside.”
Anthony Enrico 00:58
“It doesn't lead that category. It basically is the category.”
Anthony Enrico 01:56
“The big decisions aren't really decisions. They're gravity based on your motion.”
Anthony Enrico 02:25
“Your head count decides your CRM. Your pricing model decides whether you have metering or not.”
Anthony Enrico 02:31
“The stack is way more predictable than anybody selling into it wants to admit.”
Anthony Enrico 02:36
“The useful question isn't what should my stack be. It's which parts are already decided for me and where's the actual gap I need to go fix.”
Anthony Enrico 02:47
“We use HubSpot and HubSpot is our CRM are two completely different things.”
Anthony Enrico 03:13
“Nobody's picking Salesforce at scale because they necessarily love the product. They're picking it because at that size that's just where everybody ends up.”
Anthony Enrico 03:57
“Only five run real metering infrastructure. An actual engine built to measure the consumption and turn it into an invoice. Five out of 24.”
Anthony Enrico 04:27
“Everybody else is reconciling usage in spreadsheets and hand built Salesforce objects. And then invoicing off of that.”
Anthony Enrico 04:42
“One wrong sell and you've either undercharged your best customer or overcharged them straight into a churn conversation.”
Anthony Enrico 05:08
“Every manual step between the usage and the invoice is a place money quietly falls out. And most of these teams have a dozen of them.”
Anthony Enrico 05:12
“The pricing model outran the tooling and nobody has gone back to build it.”
Anthony Enrico 05:24
“A four year old workflow tool ahead of the giants. And that tells you where the whole market's heading.”
Anthony Enrico 05:42
“The old model was big database, big contract. You buy the giant data provider, you sign the seven figure deal, and then you're locked in. The new one is AI native, composable, affordable.”
Anthony Enrico 05:49
“The layer where deals literally close is the one most consistently missing from the whole stack.”
Anthony Enrico 06:15
“The affordable, composable tools seem to be everywhere. The expensive systems that touch money, metering, quote to cash, that's where the holes tend to be.”
Anthony Enrico 06:22
“From the inside, your stack feels bespoke. But from out here, it's a pattern.”
Anthony Enrico 07:15
“Not necessarily the shiny new AI tool. The boring spreadsheet sitting between your usage data and your invoice.”
Anthony Enrico 07:51
“The unglamorous systems that touch revenue are exactly the ones nobody funds until they break.”
Anthony Enrico 07:57
“The winners aren't the teams with the most tools. They're the ones who stopped fighting the decisions that were already made, and went and fixed the two or three gaps that actually leak money.”
Anthony Enrico 09:08
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

RevOps Leaders

  • Place your company in one of the five archetypes — it tells you which gaps are structural to your shape rather than unique to you.
  • Stop spending strategy cycles on the CRM debate if you are heading past 200 people; the data says where you land.
  • Separate system-of-record from adjacent use before reading any adoption number as market share.
  • Audit the path between usage data and invoice and count the manual handoffs. Each one is a place revenue leaks in both directions.
  • Prioritise by proximity to revenue rather than by visibility — nothing in the buying process corrects for the bias toward cheap and easy.

Founders

  • Treat a move to usage-based pricing as a systems commitment with a deadline, not only a go-to-market decision.
  • If you bill on usage and reconcile by hand, make that this quarter's work rather than the next AI tool.
  • Use the three tiers when building from scratch: CRM, marketing automation and enrichment at any stage; sales engagement, CPQ, warehouse and routing when the motion demands them; the frontier last.
  • Judge stack maturity by whether the revenue paths are instrumented, not by tool count.

Revenue Executives

  • Fund the unglamorous revenue-touching systems before they break — metering and quote-to-cash are the two named gaps.
  • Recognise that only about one in five enterprise-selling teams has CPQ, so the layer where deals close is likely missing in yours too.
  • Read Clay's rise as a procurement-shape signal: the market moved from seven-figure lock-in toward composable tools bought in pieces.

Sales Leaders

  • In conversation intelligence the real decision is whether to do it at all — about half these teams still do not — because the vendor question is largely settled.
  • Check whether quoting is a system or a spreadsheet; the panel says it is most often neither built nor owned.
AI Takeaways

How AI actually changes GTM

LeanScale's signature read on the AI-in-GTM question this episode wrestles with.

The thesis

The study is itself an AI artefact — Anthony had Claude read project data and strategy calls across every LeanScale customer to determine what is actually running, which is why it reports wired-in systems rather than remembered ones. The substantive AI finding is directional: composable, AI-native tooling spreads fast because it is cheap and easy to buy, while the expensive systems touching revenue go unbuilt. Adoption tracks purchase friction, not proximity to money.

Agent & automation ideas

  • An agent reading delivery data and call transcripts across a client portfolio to produce a provenance-checked tool inventory.
  • A reconciliation agent watching the path between usage data and invoice and flagging every manual handoff.
  • A stack-archetype classifier that places a company into one of the five shapes and names the gaps structural to it.
  • A drift monitor comparing what a company believes it runs against what is actually wired in.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

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Pipeline & Marketing Ops

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Customer Operations

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Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

50+
Companies in the study

Growth-stage B2B software companies, mostly Series B and C, mid-market and up, tilted toward AI-native, security and fintech.

176 across 27 categories
Tools catalogued

Each checked for provenance to separate what the company runs itself from what LeanScale runs on its behalf.

63%
Salesforce as system of record

Present in 72% of stacks overall; the gap between the two figures is the distinction between being wired in and being the system of record.

77% wired in, ~1 in 5 as CRM
HubSpot wired in vs run as CRM

For most teams it is the marketing engine underneath a Salesforce system of record.

~50% under 200 · 85% past 200 · 100% over 1,000
Salesforce share by headcount

The evidence for the gravity thesis — the CRM debate resolves into a company-size question.

~80% of adopters; ~50% of the panel adopts
Gong within conversation intelligence

About half the panel records and analyses calls systematically; Gong is nearly all of that half.

24 price on usage, 5 meter it
The metering gap

Almost half the book prices on consumption or a hybrid; only five run an engine that measures usage and produces an invoice.

$8M
Usage revenue invoiced from a spreadsheet

Anthony's illustration of the risk: one wrong cell either undercharges the best customer or overcharges them into a churn conversation.

21%
CPQ adoption among enterprise-selling teams

The layer that turns a deal into a signed number is among the most consistently missing in the whole stack.

44% of stacks
Clay adoption

Third on the board four years after barely existing, past the incumbents outbound was built on for a decade.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

LeanScaleGTM Operations

Anthony's firm and the source of the study — it runs go-to-market operations embedded inside more than fifty B2B software companies, which is what made reading live systems rather than surveying people possible. The full interactive field study is published separately.

00:20 · 00:46Company →
EmailageRisk & Fraud

Where Anthony ran RevOps before LeanScale, and the source of his views on metering. It priced on usage, closed customers such as JP Morgan on pure consumption contracts with no commitment, and employed a dedicated person to monitor and reconcile usage purely for billing.

04:46Company →
ZoomInfoGTM Data / Sales Intelligence

Named in the tight pack behind Salesforce on the tool board, and as one of the incumbents Clay has now passed after four years.

01:39 · 05:35Company →

People

Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →

Tools & software

SalesforceCRM

The system of record in 63% of the panel and present in 72% of stacks. Share rises with headcount — roughly even under 200 employees, 85% past 200, and every company over a thousand. Also named as where teams hand-build objects to reconcile usage in the absence of metering.

Website ↗
HubSpotCRM

Wired into 77% of these companies but run as the CRM by only about one in five — for most it is the marketing engine underneath a Salesforce system of record. Anchors the HubSpot growth stack archetype and the dual-CRM-in-transition shape.

Website ↗
GongRevenue Intelligence

About half the panel systematically records and analyses sales calls, and Gong is nearly 80% of those. Anthony's framing is that it does not lead conversation intelligence so much as constitute the category.

Website ↗
ClayGTM Data / Enrichment

Barely existed four years ago and now appears in 44% of stacks, third on the board and past the incumbents outbound was built on for a decade. Treated as evidence the market moved from big-database, big-contract procurement to AI-native, composable and affordable — and it anchors the modern lean-stack archetype.

Website ↗
ClaudeAI Assistant

The tool used to produce the study itself — Anthony had Claude read the project data and strategy calls behind every LeanScale customer, anonymised, to determine what is actually running.

Website ↗
Methodologies referenced Systems-read field studyProvenance checkingArchetype placement
Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

Consumption & Usage-Based Modeling

Quota design, hunter/farmer structures, and unit economics for usage-based businesses.

The metering gap is the central finding — 24 companies pricing on usage against five with real metering infrastructure.

Fractional RevOps

Embedded, field-facing RevOps leadership and execution — the operator model Jimmy describes, delivered as a service.

The study is a by-product of running embedded RevOps inside 50+ companies, and its operator advice is the prioritisation an embedded team applies.

AI for GTM

Agents and workflows that multiply operator throughput — the 'make humans superhuman' thesis, operationalized.

The composable, AI-native shift Clay represents, and the tier-three frontier of AI agents and next-gen CRM.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

How is this GTM stack study different from other state-of-the-stack reports?

It was not a survey. Other reports ask people to fill in a form describing their stack, which captures aspiration and recall. This one was built from inside more than fifty B2B software companies' live systems — delivery data, projects in flight, hundreds of strategy calls and over fifty customer Slack channels, all anonymised. Every one of the 176 tools was also checked for provenance to separate what each company runs itself from what LeanScale runs on its behalf, which is the main reason the numbers differ from other published figures.

Should we use Salesforce or HubSpot?

Largely a headcount question rather than a philosophical one. Under 200 employees it is roughly a coin flip between them. Past 200 employees it is 85% Salesforce, and above a thousand employees every company in the panel runs Salesforce. Companies at that size are not choosing it out of preference; it is simply where teams end up. If you are heading past 200 people, the useful move is to stop spending strategy cycles on the debate and spend them on a gap that is genuinely open.

How many companies with usage-based pricing actually have metering infrastructure?

Five out of twenty-four. Almost half the panel prices on usage or a hybrid model, but only five run a real metering engine — something built to measure consumption and turn it into an invoice. The other nineteen reconcile usage in spreadsheets and hand-built Salesforce objects, then invoice from those. The pricing model moved faster than the tooling, and most teams have not gone back to build what it requires.

Why is manual usage reconciliation risky?

Because every manual step between the usage data and the invoice is a place money quietly falls out, and the risk runs in both directions. Consider an $8M usage-revenue business where the invoice number comes off a hand-updated spreadsheet: one wrong cell either undercharges your best customer, which is silent revenue leakage, or overcharges them, which turns into a churn conversation. Most teams in this position have a dozen such steps rather than one.

What is the CPQ gap?

Only 21% of the enterprise-selling teams in the panel have configure-price-quote — the system that turns a negotiated deal into a signed number. That makes the layer where deals actually close among the most consistently missing pieces of the whole stack. It fits a broader pattern: affordable, composable tools spread quickly while the expensive systems that touch money go unbuilt, because adoption tracks purchase friction rather than proximity to revenue.

What are the five GTM stack archetypes?

The enterprise Salesforce suite; the HubSpot growth stack, which is the all-in-one default under 200 people; the modern AI-native lean stack, deliberately thin with Clay and a data warehouse doing the heavy lifting; the dual CRM in transition, running Salesforce and HubSpot in parallel either mid-migration or permanently split after an acquisition; and the consumption stack, where usage billing is wired to a real metering engine. Almost every company sits in one or two of them, which means the gaps in your stack are usually structural to its shape rather than unique to you.

If we are building a GTM stack from scratch, what should we buy first?

In three tiers. Tier one is table stakes at any stage: CRM, marketing automation and enrichment. Tier two is added when the motion demands it: sales engagement, CPQ, a warehouse and routing. Tier three is the frontier — next-generation CRM, AI agents and usage metering. Usage metering is the single place the market is visibly under-tooled, which makes it both the clearest gap and the hardest one to buy your way out of.

Timeline

Jump through the conversation

Click any chapter to open it in the transcript.

00:00What we did, and why it is not a survey 01:03Who is actually in the study 01:27The whole board: every tool, ranked 01:46Conversation intelligence, and why Gong is the category 02:03The thesis: your stack is gravity, not strategy 02:53Salesforce vs HubSpot is a headcount question 03:13HubSpot's two different jobs 04:07The metering gap: 24 price on usage, 5 meter it 04:46What usage billing looked like at Emailage 05:30Clay: from nothing to number three in four years 06:03The CPQ gap 06:33The five stack archetypes 07:20What an operator should actually do 08:04Three tiers: table stakes, motion-driven, frontier 08:39Caveats and the through-line
Full Transcript

The whole conversation

Broken into chapters, searchable, verbatim from the audio. Speakers inferred (not diarized).

Transcript as markdown ↓ Whole episode as markdown ↓
00:00What we did, and why it is not a survey

0:00 I had Claude read the project data and the strategy calls behind every single one of LeanScale's customers

0:07 to see what tools they're actually using, the real systems we run for them, all anonymized,

0:12 no names attached. Not a survey, but actual data from the field. And the stack we found isn't

0:20 exactly what you see on your LinkedIn feed. I'm Anthony Enrico, co-founder and CEO of LeanScale.

0:26 We run go-to-market operations for fast-growing B2B software companies.

0:30 We're basically the RevOps team embedded inside their revenue engine. So here's why the study is

0:36 different from every other state at the stack report you've seen. We didn't survey anybody.

0:40 Nobody filled out a form telling us what they wish their stack looked like. We actually built

0:46 this from inside over 50 companies' actual systems, the live delivery data, and the projects we're

0:52 literally building for them right now. Hundreds of calls and over 50 real-time Slack channels

0:58 where the actual conversations live. Everybody in RevOps has an opinion about the stack.

01:03Who is actually in the study

1:03 We get to see what everyone is actually using from the inside. Quick note on who's actually

1:08 in this so you know what you're looking at. Over 50 B2B software companies, mostly Series B and

1:15 Series C, mid-market and up with a heavy tilt towards AI native, security, and FinTech.

1:21 Growth stage teams with real revenue and a real RevOps function, not startups that are

01:27The whole board: every tool, ranked

1:27 still figuring it out. Here's the whole book. Now, rank every tool by how many companies

1:32 actually run it and there's a clear champion. Salesforce is still on top. It shows up in 72%

1:39 of these stacks, then a tight pack right behind it. HubSpot's marketing hub, play, gong, and zoom

01:46Conversation intelligence, and why Gong is the category

1:46 info. But let's sit on one of those for a second. Conversation intelligence. About half the book

1:51 records and analyze their sales calls in a systematic way and of those companies, gong is

1:56 almost 80% of them. It doesn't lead that category. It basically is the category. Keep that board in

02:03The thesis: your stack is gravity, not strategy

2:03 your head because the rest of the stack is a lot less settled than gong. The entire industry talks

2:09 about your stack like it's a set of strategic decisions. You pick your CRM philosophy. You pick

2:15 your modern composable tools. You build your stack like it says something about who you are.

2:20 I don't think that's what's actually happening here. When you read through over 50 of these

2:25 stacks side by side, the big decisions aren't really decisions. They're gravity based on your

2:31 motion. Your head count decides your CRM. Your pricing model decides whether you have metering

2:36 or not. The stack is way more predictable than anybody selling into it wants to admit.

2:41 The same handful of patterns showed up across all 50 companies and not one of them is what a vendor

2:47 will tell you. The useful question isn't what should my stack be. It's which parts are already

02:53Salesforce vs HubSpot is a headcount question

2:53 decided for me and where's the actual gap I need to go fix. Let's start with the CRM because that's

3:00 the fight everybody has. Salesforce or HubSpot. It's basically a personality test in the industry

3:06 now. The data is pretty calm about it. Salesforce is the system of record in 63% of these companies.

03:13HubSpot's two different jobs

3:13 HubSpot is wired into 77% of them but we use HubSpot and HubSpot is our CRM are two completely

3:22 different things. For most of these teams HubSpot is the marketing engine running underneath a

3:26 Salesforce system of record. Only about one in five actually run it as the CRM. Then if you split

3:33 it by company size the whole debate falls apart. Under 200 employees it's a coin flip. About 50%

3:40 Salesforce 50% HubSpot. Cross 200 people and it jumps to 85% Salesforce. Over a thousand employees

3:51 every single company 100%. So the CRM question mostly comes down to how big you are. Nobody's

3:57 picking Salesforce at scale because they necessarily love the product. They're picking it because at

4:02 that size that's just where everybody ends up. Now the one that I think is going to continue

04:07The metering gap: 24 price on usage, 5 meter it

4:07 to be more interesting. The metering gap. At some point in the last few years a huge slice of

4:13 software moved to usage based pricing. You pay for what you consume. Customers love it. It aligns

4:19 everybody. Genuinely a great model. In over 50 of the companies that we went over 24 companies price

4:27 on usage or some hybrid of it. Almost half the book but only five run real metering infrastructure.

4:35 An actual engine built to measure the consumption and turn it into an invoice. Five out of 24.

4:42 Everybody else is reconciling usage in spreadsheets and hand built Salesforce objects.

04:46What usage billing looked like at Emailage

4:46 And then invoicing off of that. I lived this before at a company called Emailage. We had

4:51 usage based pricing. We closed companies like JP Morgan on pure usage based contracts. No commitment

4:57 at all. And we had a dedicated person to monitor usage and reconcile usage just for billing.

5:03 Say you're doing eight million in usage revenue and the number on the invoice is coming off of a

5:08 Google Sheet. Somebody updates by hand. One wrong sell and you've either undercharged your best

5:12 customer or overcharged them straight into a churn conversation. Every manual step between the usage

5:18 and the invoice is a place money quietly falls out. And most of these teams have a dozen of them.

5:24 The pricing model outran the tooling and nobody has gone back to build it.

05:30Clay: from nothing to number three in four years

5:30 Third one and this one I actually love. Clay. Four years ago Clay basically didn't exist.

5:35 Today it's in 44% of these stacks. Number three on the board you just saw. Past the incumbents

5:42 everybody built their outbound on for a decade. A four year old workflow tool ahead of the giants.

5:49 And that tells you where the whole market's heading. The old model was big database,

5:53 big contract. You buy the giant data provider, you sign the seven figure deal,

5:58 and then you're locked in. The new one is AI native, composable, affordable.

06:03The CPQ gap

6:03 You wire together exactly the data you need and it's winning. Now flip that same point over,

6:09 the CPQ gap. Configure price quote, the system that actually turns a deal into a signed number.

6:15 Only 21% of the enterprise selling teams in our panel have it. The layer where deals literally

6:22 close is the one most consistently missing from the whole stack. So the affordable,

6:27 composable tools seem to be everywhere. The expensive systems that touch money,

06:33The five stack archetypes

6:33 metering, quote to cash, that's where the holes tend to be. I told you the same patterns kept

6:38 showing up and here they are. Five shapes and almost every company lives in one or two of them.

6:44 The enterprise Salesforce suite, the scaled sales led seller, the HubSpot growth stack,

6:50 the all in one default under 200 people, the modern AI native lean stack deliberately thin,

6:57 clay in a warehouse doing the heavy lifting, the dual CRM in transition,

7:02 Salesforce and HubSpot running in parallel mid migration or permanently split. This can happen

7:08 due to acquisition or mergers in the consumption stack usage build wired to a real metering engine.

7:15 I'm sure you just placed yourself in one of those. That's the whole point. From the inside,

07:20What an operator should actually do

7:20 your stack feels bespoke. But from out here, it's a pattern. So if you're an operator watching this,

7:26 what do you actually do with it? First, stop agonizing over the decisions that are really

7:31 already made for you. If you're heading past 200 people, you're likely going to end up on Salesforce.

7:36 It's not a failure of imagination. It's not a knock on HubSpot. That's just the gravity of

7:41 the stack. Spend that energy somewhere where it matters. Second, go look at where your stack

7:46 touches money. If you bill on usage and you're reconciling it by hand, that's a thing to fix

7:51 this quarter. Not necessarily the shiny new AI tool. The boring spreadsheet sitting between your

7:57 usage data and your invoice. Same story with quote to cash. The unglamorous systems that touch revenue

08:04Three tiers: table stakes, motion-driven, frontier

8:04 are exactly the ones nobody funds until they break. And if you're building from scratch,

8:09 we sorted all 176 tools into three tiers. Tier one, CRM, marketing automation, enrichment. You buy

8:17 at any stage, these are table stakes. Tier two, sales engagement, CPQ, warehouse, routing. You add

8:26 when the motion demands it. Tier three is the frontier, next gen CRM, AI agents, and usage

8:33 metering. And that last one is the single place the market is visibly under tooled right now.

08:39Caveats and the through-line

8:39 Now the quick caveat, this is around 50 growth stage B2B, mostly series B and C companies.

8:46 It's a floor, not necessarily a ceiling. Real adoption is probably a little higher than what

8:50 we can see wired in. And it's a snapshot of right now, but the patterns were recognizable enough to

8:56 share. So the through line, your stack is more decided than you think. Company size picks your

9:02 CRM, your pricing model creates your gaps, and the cheap, composable tools spread fast,

9:08 while the expensive systems that touch revenue quietly go unbuilt. The winners aren't the teams

9:13 with the most tools. They're the ones who stopped fighting the decisions that were already made,

9:18 and went and fixed the two or three gaps that actually leak money. If you want the whole thing,

9:22 every finding, every chart, all 50 plus companies, the full interactive study is linked down in the

9:28 description. Go pull your own stack apart right next to it. This is Anthony from LeanScale,

9:34 the team inside the stack, rooting for your next stage of growth.