So they built in-house and hired more sales reps with that budget instead.

Nitrogen Wealth is a platform for financial advisors in a regulated and relationship-heavy business. For them, the quality of a rep’s conversation often determines whether or not they win the account. The approach to improving those conversations was a sales enablement person and a knowledge-base SaaS tool like HighSpot.

It was expensive, bottlenecked to one person’s bandwidth, and produced generic content instead of deal-specific content.

What Nitrogen built is a sales coach in Claude. Reps run a command, and it routes them to whatever they need: pre-call prep, post-call coaching, pipeline analysis, prospecting research, a daily briefing. Each sub-skill pulls from the right source. Call transcripts come from Gong. CRM context from Salesforce. Product knowledge comes from Nitrogen’s internal knowledge base.

Every output the coach produces is graded against N.O.R.T.H., Nitrogen’s proprietary rhetoric and tone handbook, encoded as structured Guru cards. So when the AI coaches a rep, it coaches them as Nitrogen with correct terms, correct voice, correct brand. For example, “Risk Number,” not “risk score.”

The post-call coaching just summarizes the conversation and scores it against their sales rubric: rapport, agenda-setting, show-tell-show structure, how the rep handled competitive questions. It tells a rep exactly where they left points on the table.

The Rollout

They phased the release with incremental improvements. First pre-call prep, coaching a week later, pipeline analysis after that. Justin met with every rep individually before launch. He expected some resistance. Instead, reps asked when they’d get more tools. The reps were getting everything from Claude. Highspot became unnecessary; they won’t renew their subscription.

The actual story

Nitrogen isn’t really a sales coach story. It’s a leadership story.

Dan Zitting, Nitrogen’s CEO, was the one who pushed back on hiring a sales enablement manager in the first place. He was able to lead the transformation by demonstrating how he uses AI to be more productive and set the tone for what his expectations are from the function leaders.

This trend shows up everywhere at Nitrogen. ProductBoard is already gone. Replaced by Google Sheets, Jira board, and AI skills. 15Five, the employee check-in platform, is on the bubble: They built a temporary Basecamp-based alternative for senior leadership while they wait to see if 15Five ships MCP support. Gong, while too embedded to cut today, is on the watch list. The more the sales coach matures, the less Gong’s own scoring and analysis features justify the spend.

None of this is organic. It’s the downstream effect of a CEO who understands what AI can do and can demonstrate it.

The CEO and functional leaders’ expertise in AI directly correlates with adoption at the company.

For the past two decades, I sat on the vendor side of B2B SaaS. In recent years, I watched renewal conversations change. Customers who used to haggle on price started asking a different question: why are we paying for this at all?

A few years ago, that question was mostly hypothetical. Companies would easily put down their credit cards for a SaaS product. Creating a solution in-house was expensive, slow, and risky. The SaaS argument was airtight:

That argument has broken down.

AI has collapsed the cost of building custom solutions to the point where a motivated operator (not even an engineer) can ship a working internal tool in weeks, for a fraction of an annual contract value. The math changed. The renewal conversations changed with it.

I wrote about this from the SaaS vendor’s perspective [link]. The churn reason nobody is tracking. The quiet cancellations are showing up as “budget cut” in the CRM.

That piece got a response I didn’t expect. Not from SaaS executives worried about retention numbers. From operators who recognized themselves on the other side of the table. People who had made the call. Who had built something internally and wasn’t talking about it publicly.

So I decided to gather more stories and share what I hear.

Not an analysis from the outside. Stories from the inside. Executives and operators who decided to build instead of buying. Sharing their story: What they built, why they made the call, what happened, and what they’d do differently. In their words.

The SaaS industry spent twenty years making the case for renting. Now, slowly, companies are moving towards owning.

That’s what this newsletter is for.

If you made the call to build and have a story to share, I'd like to cover it. Contact me