---
title: "The State of the GTM Stack: What 50+ B2B Companies Actually Run"
episode: 104
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Anthony Enrico"
guest_title: "Co-Founder"
date_published: 2026-08-26
date_modified: 2026-09-02
duration: 00:09:41
word_count: 1606
topics: ["revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy", "pricing-packaging", "ai-in-gtm"]
canonical_url: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/state-of-the-gtm-stack-field-study/
source: "LeanScale Knowledge Hub — https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# The State of the GTM Stack: What 50+ B2B Companies Actually Run — Full Transcript

> Episode 104 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Anthony Enrico.
> Published August 26, 2026 · 00:09:41 · 1606 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://www.leanscale.team/knowledge/podcast/state-of-the-gtm-stack-field-study/

## 00:00 — What 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.

## 01:03 — Who 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

## 01:27 — The 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

## 01:46 — Conversation 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

## 02:03 — The 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

## 02:53 — Salesforce 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.

## 03:13 — HubSpot'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

## 04:07 — The 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.

## 04:46 — What 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.

## 05:30 — Clay: 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.

## 06:03 — The 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,

## 06:33 — The 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,

## 07:20 — What 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

## 08:04 — Three 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.

## 08:39 — Caveats 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.