Insights, Marketing and Sales Tech

Your Media List Isn’t Enough Anymore. Here’s What MarTech and SalesTech Leaders Need Instead.

 

by Lindsay Mahaney

I need to be honest for a sec: The media list you’ve been building for the last five years isn’t going to cut it in 2026.We still love a great reporter relationship, and we will never say no to a tier-one feature. But if you’re leading comms or marketing for a martech or salestech company right now, a narrow press strategy is leaving real pipeline on the table. To actually move buyers, you need a program built for a much bigger “knowledge landscape.” And that means going well beyond the trades.

Why the old playbook is breaking

Two things are driving this shift, and if you sell into RevOps, marketing ops, or sales leadership, you’ve probably felt both.

First, the trade press you grew up pitching is shrinking. Layoffs and consolidation have pushed some of the sharpest voices in martech and sales tech out of newsrooms and onto their own platforms. Think: Substack, LinkedIn, independent podcasts. The reporter you used to email is now also the analyst, the community builder, and the buyer’s most trusted source. The line between “media contact” and “industry influencer” has basically disappeared.

Second, and this is where our GEO/AEO work comes in, AI search is rewriting how your buyers find you in the first place. RevOps leaders aren’t Googling “best ABM platform” anymore; they’re asking an AI assistant to shortlist one for them, and that assistant is pulling from wherever your brand shows up online, not just from your homepage. SEO used to be about keywords. Now it’s about answering the actual questions your buyers are asking, in the places those models trust.

Put simply, findability now comes down to three things: 

That’s a heavier lift than a press release calendar. It means your PR and content program has to live on every platform your buyers actually trust, including the one we want to talk about today: Substack.

Substack, for folks who sell to marketers and sellers

Substack bills itself as “the app for independent voices,” and for B2B tech, that’s exactly right. It’s where GTM leaders, RevOps practitioners, and martech operators are publishing the frameworks, the “why this failed,” and the unfiltered takes that never would have survived a corporate content review and their audiences trust it more for exactly that reason.

For your brand, that makes Substack a legitimate earned-and-owned hybrid: a channel where a founder or CMO byline can sit alongside the exact operators who influence your buying committee, and where a smart pitch or guest post can put you in front of a highly qualified, highly engaged list.

Substacks worth your attention if you sell into MarTech or SalesTech

Here’s where we’d point a martech or salestech comms lead who wants to know where the category is actually talking:

  • The GTMnow Newsletter (by GTMfund) — Tens of thousands of subscribers deep into go-to-market strategy, RevOps, and the playbooks behind fast-growing B2B companies. 
    • Who should read it: Anyone pitching a sales tech or RevOps platform, or looking for the operators shaping how GTM teams buy.
  • Category Pirates — A ~30K-subscriber newsletter from Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Bri Clark on category design — how challenger B2B brands carve out and own new markets. 
    • Who should read it: Martech and salestech marketers thinking about positioning, differentiation, or how to name a category instead of competing in one.
  • MarTech Data Lab — A newsletter sitting at the intersection of marketing technology, data, and growth, with deep dives on the systems behind modern marketing orgs. 
    • Who should read it: Product marketers and comms leads at martech companies who need to speak credibly to technical marketing ops buyers.
  • AI Valley — A daily newsletter (100K+ subscribers) surfacing AI trends and news before they hit the mainstream press. 
    • Who should read it: Comms leads at any AI-powered martech or salestech company who need to stay ahead of the news cycle their own product lives inside.
  • The Rundown AI — The largest AI newsletter community around (1M+ subscribers), covering practical AI applications alongside major launches. 
    • Who should read it: Martech and salestech leaders building or buying AI features who need the plain-English version of what’s shipping.

This is your findability moment

Substack won’t replace your media relationships, and it shouldn’t. But if you’re only measuring PR by press hits, you’re optimizing for a knowledge landscape that stopped existing a couple of years ago. The martech and salestech buyers you’re trying to reach are getting their information (and increasingly, their AI-generated answers) from exactly these kinds of independent, trusted voices.

If you’re ready to build a program that actually accounts for how your buyers find you now, let’s talk.