# Marcus Tilley, VP of Revenue at Meridian Field Services — read of deal-tracker-ai, May 12 2026

> 14 years in B2B sales, currently running a 9-rep field sales team for a 70-person vertical SaaS company. My forecasting stack is HubSpot plus a pivot table Caleb from finance emails me every Monday.

## How I got here

Someone in a LinkedIn comments thread on a post about Clari pricing dropped this link. The comment said something like "check this out if you want AI forecasting without the enterprise tax." I clicked from my phone during my son's baseball warmups. Came back on desktop to actually read it.

## What I clicked first

"Your reps forecast deals based on hope, not data."

That line stopped me. Not because it's clever, it's not. But because it's exactly how I'd describe my current situation to my CEO. I say a version of that sentence every quarter review. So I kept reading. Then things got strange.

## Where I paused

The disclosure block. "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations."

I read that three times. I came to this page looking for a deal tracking tool. By the middle of the page I'm reading something that feels like a pitch to a startup founder, not a sales manager. The product isn't deal tracking software. The product is a dossier about a deal tracking software idea. Those are completely different things and the page doesn't telegraph that until you're already confused.

## What I distrusted

The self-scoring. "buyer clarity: 10/10. credibility: 10/10." You're grading your own credibility. That's not credibility. That's a rubric someone filled out about themselves.

Also this: "$-17,473 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)." A negative number. On a homepage. For a product I'm apparently supposed to pay $99 to $199 to adopt. The page explains this is a Fermi estimate but there's no real context for what "take-home" means or who it applies to. Am I the sales manager using this tool? Am I the person building and selling this tool? The page talks to both of those people at the same time and serves neither of them well.

"financial upside: 1/10" is also in there. They're warning me the financial upside is one out of ten and asking me to adopt the idea. I appreciate honesty but that's a tough ask.

## What would convince me

If I'm the intended buyer, meaning I'm an operator who wants to build and resell a deal tracking product, then I need to see one person who did exactly that with a Wishdeal dossier and got paying customers. Not a quote. A name, a LinkedIn, an ARR number, and what they actually built. Even one. "Agency owner in Denver, sold 12 seats at $200/month to roofing companies." That would land.

If I'm a sales manager evaluating actual software, I need the page to figure out which product it is and stop trying to serve both audiences.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The headline says this is for sales managers. The "who this is for" block says B2B operators and agency owners. Which one am I? Because those are two different reasons to be on this page.

2. Is there working software I can actually log into today, or is the product the PDF-style dossier? The "Try it" button and "Start Free Trial" calls to action suggest yes, but the "we don't have live customers yet" disclosure suggests no.

3. What does someone who paid $99 to $199 to "adopt the build" actually walk away with? What does "working code starter" mean in practice, and what would it cost me beyond $199 to get to something I could charge a customer for?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The pain point at the top of the page is real and they named it precisely. But the product confused me badly enough that I'd need 60 seconds of clarity on what I'm actually buying before I'd move. That clarity isn't on the page.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-12. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*