Looking ahead: what we are betting on for 2027
A short and necessarily speculative post about the few bets we are willing to make on what physical security GTM looks like next year.
We are coming up on the end of our second full fiscal year. The team has earned the right to make a few specific predictions about where physical security GTM goes in 2027, with the caveat that we will be wrong about at least one of them. These are the bets, not the marketing.
Bet one: the end of generic outbound
We expect 2027 to be the year the last large security integrator quietly stops buying contact lists. The economics of generic outbound have been deteriorating for three years. The combination of inbox saturation, AI clutter in the recipient's inbox, and rising compliance pressure on data brokers will finish the job. The teams that built specificity muscles in 2025 and 2026 will be the only ones still sending real outbound by mid 2027.
Bet two: agentic outbound, with limits
We expect a wave of agentic outbound tools in the first half of the year, most of them disappointing, one or two genuinely useful. The useful ones will not be the ones that send the most. They will be the ones that decide not to send the most. Refusal is the new feature. The agents that pass on 80 percent of the signals will outperform the agents that act on all of them.
Bet three: deliverability becomes a content problem
We expect the deliverability conversation to fully migrate from infrastructure to content. The inbox providers are moving fast enough that warmup vendors and rotation tricks are losing ground. The teams that survive will be the ones whose actual email bodies are different per recipient because the underlying reason is different. That is a content problem, not an infrastructure problem.
Bet four: the channel resurgence
We expect the channel motion (partnerships with electrical, low voltage, GCs, brokers) to enjoy a quiet renaissance, because every other channel is getting noisier. Channel relationships compound. Channel partners share signals. Channel partners screen. The integrators that invest in two or three real channel relationships per year will look like geniuses by Q3 of next year.
Bet five: scoring goes durable
We expect more teams to treat scoring as a long-term contract with the sales team, not a tunable knob. The four-question rubric, or something very much like it, becomes the default. Black-box scoring loses ground. Defensible, decomposable scoring wins, because reps refuse to trust anything they cannot explain in a deal review.
- Generic outbound dies in 2027
- Agentic outbound succeeds by refusing
- Deliverability becomes a content problem
- Channel motions enjoy a renaissance
- Scoring goes durable and decomposable
“We do not need to be right about every bet. We need to be right about enough of them to keep building the right product for the next 18 months.”
A small thank you
If you have made it this far in our field notes, you are the kind of person we are building this for. The kind who reads carefully, prefers specificity, and treats their territory like a craft rather than a target. We hope the next year is good to you. We will keep writing what we see.
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