What I'm Taking Away From Our Revenue Summit

We held our annual Revenue Summit here at ParkerGale a few weeks ago, bringing together sales, marketing, and revops leaders from across our portfolio. 

This summit is always one of my favorite days of the year. Not just because we get to geek out in-person on GTM tactics, but because of what happens when you put a bunch of smart operators in a room together and give them permission to share the hard, important things they’re trying to figure out.

Here are a few big ideas I'm taking away from this year's summit.

Mastering the Basics

I have one overriding feeling leaving the summit this year: it's never been more important to master the basics.

As I've written about before, I think we're exiting a period in the world of B2B software where artificially-inflated demand led to sloppy fundamentals for lots of companies. Now that things are a little bit harder (read: normal) out there, we're noticing a lot of sales and marketing teams out there actually didn't have good technique. They were just riding the wave of their market and the tailwind of well-funded customers who were willing to buy software before they knew if they needed it. 

One great example of one of these basic but atrophied techniques that resonated with our attendees was the ideal customer profile (ICP). Our keynote speaker, Megan Bowen from Refine Labs, facilitated a great conversation on this topic for us. (Megan’s brand/demand/expand framework was a big hit too - you can learn more about it here.)

Refine Labs’ "Brand/Demand/Expand” framework started some good conversations about tactics, strategy, and measurement across our sales, marketing, and revops leaders (Source: Refine Labs)

We stopped and lingered on the ICP topic during Megan’s keynote for longer than I expected—not because people didn't understand what an ICP is, but because many leaders in the room admitted they felt stuck in the middle between understanding it and operationalizing it.

At ParkerGale, we view the ICP as both a concept and a tool. Yes, you have to agree on what your Ideal Customer Profile is first. And agreeing on that concept is genuinely hard—it forces tough conversations about who your company and product is built to serve and who you're not. But once you've got that alignment, it needs to quickly become a tool you use to run your business. That's where most companies get stuck: aligned around an ICP, but not operationalized.

So what gets in the way of that? What keeps companies from operationalizing their ICP? 

Two specific obstacles emerged from our discussion:

Obstacle 1: Building a “specific enough” ICP

Instead of "mid-market manufacturing companies," you need "manufacturing companies with 200-1000 employees, $50M-$500M in revenue, selling into automotive or aerospace, with distributed production facilities." That level of filterable detail lets you build lists, score accounts, and make go/no-go decisions without escalating to leadership every time.

Obstacle 2: Building the actual list

This is where most companies completely stall out. You need a list you can print out, hand to a BDR, and say "these are the 500 companies we care about this year—track your progress against this list." Not a concept. Not a Venn diagram. An actual spreadsheet with company names, decision-maker titles, and account scores that sales and marketing can rally around.

Those seem like relatively simple tasks. Why do so many companies stop short of completing them? We talked about this in the room too. The main reason is that this last mile of ICP work is, honestly, kind of annoying. It's boring, operational grunt work. And it’s way less satisfying than just getting aligned around your ICP. 

See, it feels good to get aligned on an abstract idea of who your ideal customer is, and some companies take that good feeling as a signal that they can stop there. That's a mistake. The alignment conversation is important, but that alignment is just the permission slip you need to do the real work. The real work is turning that alignment into a list, getting it into your CRM, assigning accounts to reps, and then (here's the part everyone forgets) actually measuring whether your marketing dollars and sales activities are concentrated against that list or inadvertently drifting into other accounts and market segments that don't fit.

That stuff (building and using that list and preventing that drift) is the least fun part of any GTM job.

It also just might be the most important.

Here’s a clip of me talking to our summit attendees about why this is such an important value creation lever inside the ParkerGale portfolio.

Yeah, We Talked a Lot About AI Too

Yeah, everybody everywhere is talking about AI. We’re guilty too. We spent a lot of time discussing it at the Revenue Summit—not only where we think AI is going but more importantly, what our companies can actually do with it today.

Our big learning from the summit? Everything starts with mining customer conversations. If you're using call recording software like Fathom, Gong, Granola, or Salesloft, you're sitting on a pile of customer insights that can make you look like a mind reader in front of your target market… if you know how to harness it. This unstructured conversational data is the foundation. It’s the raw material that feeds everything else. 

We're finding success mining that data to understand how customers actually talk about their problems, then using those insights to inform product marketing, content marketing, demand gen programs, advertisements, prospecting emails, and talk tracks. This isn't about building 15-step autonomous agentic workflows or replacing big slugs of your team with AI agents. It's about finally using the data you're already collecting to talk about your products in a clearer, more straightforward way, and then putting those insights and that messaging in the hands of your marketers and salespeople to make them more effective.

But the biggest unlock? We think it’s taking the time to teach individual people inside your business how to leverage AI in their own unique, personal ways. Your AI strategy should be a three-step process: teaching your people to use it, giving them space to practice, and encouraging them to share what's working. Do that, and you'll be ahead of almost every other company out there. This is the culture-building lens on AI that a lot of the discussion out there on LinkedIn seems to be missing. We think that work is really important.

Where we think AI is going (and what we'll see more of in 2026) is using it to scale excellence instead of just increasing efficiency. It's about taking what your best people already do and building tiny AI-powered automations that put that power in the hands of your entire team. We're starting to do this by building custom AI tools that replicate key steps in the sales process (prospecting, follow-ups and proposals, demo execution—but there's a lot more we plan on discovering in 2026 as we continue to experiment here.

What the Revenue Summit Is Actually For

Leading a revenue function in a PE-backed business is rewarding because you get to figure hard things out and see how your decisions move the business forward. But it’s also hard because sometimes it can be tough to admit when you’re uncertain about something. 

When you’re leading sales, marketing, or revops, your CEO and your team needs to believe you know where you're going. Your investors and your board need evidence the plan is working. With all this pressure, admitting uncertainty out loud can feel like you're failing at something you should have figured out by now — even when that uncertainty is completely legitimate, and even when you know there will always be tons to figure out.

That pressure and that feeling might be the most important reason we have a Revenue Summit.

Put those same leaders in a room with peers from other portfolio companies and something shifts. When someone mentioned they're struggling to nail down their messaging and three other hands immediately went up with "us too," the relief was visible. Not because the solution magically appeared, but because the problem was legitimized. It was a signal that you’re not behind on something basic. You're dealing with something genuinely hard that other smart people also find hard.

Harvard’s Amy Edmondson, whose research on psychological safety has shaped how teams everywhere talk about learning and failure, calls this distinction a “learning frame” versus an “execution frame.” In execution mode, problems are failures that need fixing immediately. In learning mode, problems are puzzles that smart people figure out together. PE-backed companies live in execution mode by default—there are numbers to hit, milestones to reach, value to create. But the Revenue Summit creates a few hours of intentional learning mode, bringing together people facing similar puzzles, with no obligation to pretend they have all the answers.

Final Thoughts

The best part about running these summits isn't watching people learn new frameworks or discover new tactics. It's watching them realize they're not alone in the quest to figure this stuff out. That the challenges they're wrestling with are complex problems, not personal failings. That getting better at the important things is about drilling the same fundamentals over and over again.

Two of ParkerGale's core values are "we share what we know" and "we bring people together." Most companies treat those as separate activities—knowledge transfer happens in one room, networking happens in another. But they're actually the same thing. You can't share what you know if you're performing certainty instead of admitting what you're still figuring out. And bringing people together only creates value if the environment lets them be honest about what's hard.

I think our Revenue Summit works because it creates permission to be uncertain in public.

That's rare in most PE-backed businesses.

But it's also the only way anyone actually gets any better.