Predominantly layoff news in the feed, despite GDP earnings over quota, Nvidia crossing $5 trillion valuation, positive economic outlook and S&P in a great shape.
From a RevOps perspective, this sets several considerations for 2026 planning:
1. Staffing
Hiring would be slightly easier, but there’s a lot of mud in the water still. Some of the cuts were tied to productivity issues or org structure mishaps in teams. If teams of 10 were tasked to solve a problem, which alternative orgs can now solve with 3 people, adapting to the new model may not be trivial.
2. Expansion through partners
Agencies, consultancies, contractors, SaaS will still be in heavy use.
There’s fragmentation in this space, with thousands of agencies going under over the past 2 years, and hundreds of thousands of solo/freelancers returning to FTEs.
Companies who have been in market for 8-10+ years have gone through ups and downs, calibrating the process for efficiency.
3. Revenue/spend considerations
The trade relationships, shutdown, and job insecurity may pull some spending in the upper tier of Maslow’s pyramid.
If you’re serving this market, the economy may be less gracious next year.
Otherwise, commodity solutions and first-tier needs will still remain, no matter what.
Global capital isn’t shrinking; but some segments are getting impacted hard. Is this your ICP or not?
4. Operational efficiency
Our best implementations of LLM solutions and programmatic/automation tools are not in outbound activities, but operational efficiency.
Internal workflows and SOPs can be improved significantly more often than not.
Maintaining momentum and striving for that 20% or 30% growth next year is still plausible, with slower hiring and more strategic augmentation of in-house resources + external partners in key areas.
All in all, the market is still turbulent, even after the 2022-2023 era.
But higher up stakeholders took a note and adapted. This is primarily impacting day-to-day work and activities that will be getting replaced over the next 2-3 years.
