The thing that has quietly driven me insane for six years is not competitor pricing. It's not scope creep. It's not founders who vanish for three weeks and resurface asking "so where are we on the content calendar?" as if time is a suggestion.
It's onboarding.
Specifically, how SaaS companies onboard their GTM hires. After working with 124+ partners, I can confirm: most companies do it so badly that the failure itself has become invisible. Nobody notices because everybody does it. It's like living next to a train track. You stop hearing the train.
Two Species
Over the years, I've started sorting every partner into one of two categories the moment we kick off an engagement. Shallow onboarders and deep onboarders. The names aren't creative. The difference between them is staggering.
You can usually tell which one you're dealing with within the first 48 hours. Sometimes within the first Slack message.
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Here's what separates them:
| Dimension | Shallow Onboarding | Deep Onboarding |
|---|---|---|
| ICP documentation | "Enterprise companies in North America" | Psychographics, buying triggers, objections by persona, real customer quotes |
| Messaging framework | Single page written in panic before a board meeting | Stage-specific messaging with documented A/B test results |
| Competitive intel | Nothing, or a feature comparison table from 2023 | Updated quarterly with positioning, pricing, and win/loss patterns |
| Process playbooks | Tribal knowledge in three people's heads | Documented workflows for content, campaigns, and lead routing |
| Campaign history | "Ask Sarah, she was here last year" | Honest post-mortems with data on what worked and what bombed |
| New hire ramp time | 3-6 months of archaeology | Productive within weeks |
| AI tool effectiveness | Generic output that could apply to any B2B company | Output that sounds like a two-year employee wrote it |
The gap between these two species has always mattered. In 2026, with AI tools reshaping how GTM teams operate, it has become a canyon.
The "Figure It Out" School
Shallow onboarding looks like this: a new GTM hire gets Slack access, a laptop, and a pat on the back. Maybe someone forwards them a pitch deck from 2023 with the old logo on it.
The ICP document, if it exists, narrows the target market to about 400,000 organizations. Incredibly helpful.
There are no documented processes. No competitive intelligence. No recorded product demos. No objection handling guides. The institutional knowledge of the company lives exclusively inside the heads of three people who are all "too busy to do a proper handoff right now."
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The new hire is told to "just jump in and figure it out." Which sounds empowering until you realize they're being asked to rebuild a bicycle that someone already built, rode for two years, crashed, rebuilt, and never documented any of those iterations.
Every new hire. Every single time. Rebuilding from scratch.
Deep Onboarding: Years of Knowledge in Weeks
The other species is genuinely beautiful to witness. Like watching a well-organized kitchen during dinner rush. Everything has a place. Everyone knows where it is.
A new GTM hire joins and receives access to a knowledge base that has been built, refined, and maintained over years. The messaging framework covers every stage of the funnel. The competitive intelligence brief is updated quarterly. There are recorded product demos, onboarding call recordings, and a library of past campaign performance with honest post-mortems.
A new hire in this environment absorbs years of accumulated knowledge in weeks. They don't need to rediscover that enterprise prospects care about compliance more than your slick UI. They don't need to learn the hard way that your biggest competitor's weakness is support response time. It's all there. Written down. Organized. Searchable.
And because they're not spending their first quarter doing archaeology, they can actually contribute original thinking almost immediately.
What Good Documentation Actually Means
Not a shared Google Drive with 47 untitled documents and a folder called "OLD - DO NOT USE (2)" that definitely still gets used.
Is building all of this a massive amount of work? Yes. Does it feel like a distraction from "real work"? Every time. Is it the single highest-ROI investment a GTM team can make? Without question.
The AI Multiplier
Here's where this goes from "important best practice" to "existential gap between companies."
Every GTM team is experimenting with AI tools. Claude, GPT, Gemini, Copilot. And these tools are genuinely powerful. We use Claude Code across our entire operation at Empact Partners, and the productivity gains are real.
But here's what nobody talks about at the AI productivity conferences: AI tools are only as good as the documentation you feed them.
The companies that invested in documentation over the past five years are now getting a 10x return on that investment through AI. The ones that didn't are falling further behind every month. The gap is accelerating.
The Uncomfortable Truth
I'll be honest. We benefit when partners have deep documentation. It makes our work better, faster, and more effective. One of our longest partnerships has been running 5+ years precisely because they invested in documentation early. We've been able to compound that knowledge over time, helping them grow to 250K+ monthly organic sessions.
The flip side is also true. When we onboard a new partner and discover their entire GTM knowledge base is a Notion page with four bullet points and a broken embed, we know the first three months will be spent building the foundation that should have existed before we arrived.
In an era where AI agents can execute entire workflows autonomously if you give them the right context, that missing documentation isn't an inconvenience. It's a competitive disadvantage that compounds daily.
So What Do You Do About It?
Start writing things down. I know, revolutionary advice. Someone put this man on a TED stage.
But seriously: start with your ICPs. Not the one-liner version. The real version. Then your messaging framework. Then your competitive positioning. Then your process playbooks. Document one thing per week. In six months, you'll have a knowledge base that transforms how your team operates and how effectively you can use AI tools.
Or keep winging it. Keep watching new hires spend their first quarter rediscovering what the last person already knew. Keep getting generic output from AI tools because you have nothing specific to feed them.
Your call.
If you want to talk about building a GTM engine that actually compounds knowledge over time, grab 30 minutes on my calendar. I promise I'll only be mildly opinionated.
