That’s going to end well… Why does everyone fret about trying to accommodate this aberrant behavior? And yes, I don’t care if it’s 53%, it’s still aberrant because it’s unsatisfactory for good business. Instead set the specific goal of hiring only 2nd & 3rd standard deviation talent. Leave the rest to your competitors….or the co-interviewing parents.

Attackers worked out that shutting down a production line pays more than locking up email or ERP. Production goes to zero. Dragos: ransomware vs. industrial orgs up 87% in 2024, manufacturing hit hardest. Brian C. Reed of Anaconda on the IGI podcast. #OTSecurity

Either your current team can produce enough activity to hit the number, or they can't. Coaching and optimistic forecasts don't change that. It's arithmetic, not motivation. #SalesLeadership #PrivateEquity

A CEO to a seller: “Stop chasing me. Find the owner of the problem in the management tier.” Going high by default isn’t a strategy. Find who actually owns the pain. Brian C. Reed on the Industrial Growth Institute podcast. #B2BSales

Your AI analysis sounds right. That's the problem. More leaders are pointing Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot at their CRM, ERP and marketing data and asking it to explain the business. The answers come back fast, polished and confident. Too often they're also wrong, and nothing in the answer tells you so. Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, tested this on its own internal analytics. Without structured context, Claude answered accurately no more than 21% of the time. With a governed data foundation and skills built on top of it, the same model topped 95%. Their conclusion: analytics accuracy is "a context and verification problem, not a code generation issue." Put simply: AI is great at data analysis. It's really bad at data engineering. And most people using it are quietly asking it to do both. Join Ed Marsh (Ed Marsh Consulting) and Nikos Ntirlis (Databox) for a straight-talk conversation about why "just connect your AI to your data" is dangerous advice, and what to do instead. What we'll cover: 1. Where the data comes from. Why an AI connection to your CRM often returns only part of your data, and why neither you nor the model can tell. 2. Definitions. How "revenue," "pipeline" or "win rate" can mean three different things in three systems, and why the same question can return two different numbers. 3. The context layer. What the model needs to know about your business to map a question to the right data, and why newer models won't figure that out on their own. 4. Why "just connect it" is dangerous. Silent partial data, invented definitions, APIs that change constantly, token bills that pile up, and wrong answers delivered in the same confident tone as right ones. We'll save 15 minutes for your questions, including the one everyone asks: "Why don't we just build this ourselves?" Who should attend: - Private Equity Partners who have been searching for reliable, consistent rolled up insights across portfolios - CEOs, CFOs and operating leaders using AI to analyze business performance - Sponsors and operating partners who see AI-generated numbers in board decks, lender updates and value creation plans - RevOps, sales and marketing leaders building Claude skills, custom GPTs or AI workflows on company data - Anyone who has shared an AI-generated number and later wondered whether it was right You'll leave with: - A clear way to explain to your team and board why AI analysis can be confidently wrong - Practical checks to tell whether your AI is working from complete, consistently defined data - A simple way to think about where AI belongs in your analytics stack, and where it doesn't About the speakers: Ed Marsh helps private equity sponsors and industrial and manufacturing companies drive organic revenue growth. He's an independent board director, NACD Directorship® Certified, and host of the Industrial Growth Institute podcast. Nikos Ntirlis is Partnerships Manager at Databox, an analytics platform that connects data from 130+ business tools into governed, consistently defined metrics that people and AI can trust. This is a conversation, not a sales pitch. Bring your questions. Tuesday, October 27, 2026 | 12:00 to 12:45 PM ET Streaming live on LinkedIn, YouTube and X. Can't make it live? Register at linkedin.com/events/confiden…

Your plant runs on OEE. Your revenue engine deserves the same rigor. Sales is essentially a factory. #OrganicGrowth #PrivateEquity

Marketing or sales: which matters more going forward? My answer is sales. In industrial markets, how you sell is the differentiator, not what you sell. Brian C. Reed of Anaconda says “it depends.” Here’s the debate. #B2BSales #Manufacturing

Your plant knows units per hour. Your VP of Sales can't tell you how many conversations it takes to win one new logo. Sales isn't unmeasurable. It's just never been managed like it. #SalesManagement #Manufacturing

Lui Damasceno of Brooks International recently published a thoughtful article in Mergers&Acquisitions. He theorizes on why value creation plans underperform. His diagnosis: it’s rarely the strategy. It’s the operating model underneath it. I agree. But look at where every one of his examples comes from. Field support. An aerospace shop floor. Titanium dioxide plants. A railroad. All companies writ large. In not one case does he focus on the breakdown in the critical value creation lever of organic growth. There's not one GTM team mentioned. I see that pattern constantly. While I'm sure that GTM is embedded in his governance view of these portcos, there's an inverse problem to what he describes as decision rights. The ability and responsibility to diagnose GTM breakdowns are defaulted to the folks running them. They don't have the perspective. Sponsors will scrutinize decision rights, cadence and accountability on the plant floor. Then they underwrite double-digit organic growth on a marketing and sales org nobody examined with analogous rigor. The author’s three questions work just as well on the commercial side. The time to ask them is in diligence, not month nine of the hold. Where are commercial decisions actually made? If sales leadership chases slow "quotes" and doesn't have time to focus on strategy and tactics, the growth plan assumes a speed the organization can’t deliver. Does the performance system surface problems early? Bookings and revenue are lagging indicators. If nobody can show you pipeline creation by rep, stage conversion or cycle time, you’ll discover the miss after it’s already a miss. Is accountability structural or heroic? Plenty of middle-market industrial sales teams run on one or two great reps and a founder who still closes the big accounts. Stretch them, lose them, or sell the company out from under them, and the “growth engine” walks out the door. That last one is the expensive one. And you can know it before close. Commercial diligence mostly tests the market and the customer list. It almost never tests whether the people expected to deliver the growth WILL actually sell - new logos, strong margins, in today's market conditions, not those of 2022. That’s what Quality of Sales measures: an objective assessment of the team across 21 competencies, plus the management and process around them. You’d never close on a plant without understanding OEE. Why close on a growth thesis without understanding the sales team that has to deliver it?

Ask your portco for the funnel math behind the forecast. If it doesn't exist, you don't have a forecast. You have a hope with a dollar sign in front of it. #PrivateEquity #SalesForecasting

Are you evaluating your sales leader, or your market? Easy to confuse a rising market with a great leader. #SalesLeadership #GoToMarket

I asked a manufacturing CEO a simple question last week, and the answer should worry every sponsor reading this. He's planning next year's sales meeting. Aggressive growth targets. A stated goal of modernizing the sales force. Real money behind both. So I asked him what the meeting would look like if he did nothing different. "Probably a little more status quo. Identify some objectives for the year. Product review, things like that." Then I asked whether that agenda would get him closer to aggressive growth and a modernized sales force. "Not particularly." He knew. He said it out loud, without hesitation, and he wasn't being defensive about it. He just hadn't connected the annual sales meeting to the growth thesis, because nobody ever does. This is the season for it. Right now, across hundreds of portfolio companies, someone is booking a hotel block for January. The agenda is already written, because it's last year's agenda. Product updates. Quota assignments. A dinner. Someone from operations with a deck about lead times. And then everyone goes back out and sells exactly the way they sold in 2026. Here's the part that costs you. That meeting is the single largest block of concentrated time you will ever have with your entire commercial team. It is the only day of the year when every rep is in one room, off the road, with leadership's full attention. And it gets spent on information that could have been an email. You are not short of meeting time. You are short of capability. Your reps don't know how to run a discovery conversation with a buying committee that has grown from two people to seven. They don't know what to do when a buyer says they need to check with the plant manager. They've never been taught to quantify what a problem actually costs the customer, so they lead with total cost of ownership claims that every competitor also makes, which commoditizes you instead of differentiating you. None of that gets fixed by a product review. If you're a sponsor, ask your portco CEOs one question before the invitations go out. What specific commercial capability will your team have on the way home that they didn't have on the way there? If the answer is a list of topics rather than a capability, you just spent six figures and a day of everyone's time defending the status quo. And the status quo is what your hold period is already priced on. #PrivateEquity #IndustrialGrowth #B2BSales #RevenueGrowth #Manufacturing

AI is great at data analysis. It's really bad at data engineering. Anthropic tested Claude on its own analytics: 21% accurate without structured context, 95%+ with it. Oct 27, 12 PM ET: live w/ @NikolaosNtirlis & @Databox on why your AI numbers are confidently wrong. linkedin.com/events/75135912…

B2B buying and selling are changing massively. Yes, at their core, they're unchanged - people buy from people they trust. And the phone is still an amazingly effective tool for selling to senior execs. But so much around it is changing - with increasing velocity and magnitude. The inbound marketing playbook is largely ineffective. Websites are now bottom-of-the-funnel tools. Top-of-the-funnel marketing now happens through channels that accommodate consumption habits - AI answers, passively consumable audio and video, scrollable social, and communities. And sales skills are now critical - average is ineffective, and sales talent must be right-tailed in tactical sales skills, business acumen, business finance, and work ethic. I've written about this since early 2025. And AI was just getting started then. Today, AI offers countless tools and promises for mediocre marketing and sales teams. And most don't move the needle because their raison d'etre is nothing more than boosting the efficiency of stale playbooks and tactics. However, creative teams see it differently. They see an opportunity not to simply shunt unpleasant work (think prospecting) to mindless agents who will also be mediocre, but rather to redesign workflows and build capability that was essentially unimaginable at this time last year. That's why I'm so excited to partner with @Day_ai_app , @inboundseller , @markitecht , @DaphneFunston , Sam Belt, Grace Kelliher, and their colleagues to build amazing GTM models on the platform - exchanging and improving ideas with smart, creative people. For family-owned industrial companies eager to preserve and expand the legacy over the long term, and for middle-market sponsors and portco operators determined to create value through organic growth in the medium term, the capabilities that Day.ai unlocks are enormous. They range from: - board governance - strategy - product, demand gen, brand and field marketing - revenue operations - complex, big-ticket, long-sell cycle, large buying team sales - effective sales management & leadership - customer success, after-market, up & cross sell - merging counterproductive corporate silos and more. We'll stub our toes at times for sure. And this isn't an easy button that replaces a lack of rigor in the fundamentals of understanding buyers, process, methodology, etc. But for companies that fervently and sincerely want to improve, for themselves and their buyers, this is an amazing unlock. Let's go.....

Ops and finance leaders get judged on Six Sigma, cost reduction, quality. How much of that result is really theirs? #Leadership #PrivateEquity

A strong track record isn't proof of a great sales leader. The real test: did they build a sales machine that holds up when the market turns? #SalesLeadership #PrivateEquity

Where is the 12% CAGR going to come from? As @zorian has been banging the drum for two years - it's no longer from financial improvement and operational efficiency - value creation has to come from growth. And as the new @GFData shows (@ACGGlobal) , it's now basically from organic growth. The good news is we have a direction. The bad news is most GPs and operators in the industrial space understand finance and operations, but not GTM. So recognizing the need for organic growth is very different than executing. That's what my Quality of Sales and Overall Revenue Effectiveness™ Frameworks are all about. Turning the need for organic growth into valuation and exit.

Everybody claims the best widget, the best price and the best service. So what actually persuades a buyer? Joe Angel of PMMI on the Industrial Growth Institute podcast: a real case study, showing what a customer did with your equipment in their plant. No better testimonial, bar none. And keep the white papers from turning into sales pitches. Watch the full Industrial Growth Institute Podcast episode here youtu.be/stSL207Qquo #B2BMarketing #CaseStudies