Ten years after its founding in 2015, partner revenue platform WorkSpan combined its offerings into a single AI product. WorkSpan manages over $78 billion of co-sell pipeline for hyperscalers like Deloitte, ServiceNow, and Databricks — and in the partnerships world, specificity sells.
The WorkSpan product messaging that will resonate with a software-to-services partner is different from a services-to-software partner. Amazon cloud partnerships have different program benefits and language from Google cloud partnerships.
To accommodate this, WorkSpan deployed a highly tailored marketing strategy to nine distinct partnership types. All its salespeople and marketers suddenly needed to "speak partnerships" to stay effective.
Sam Gong, WorkSpan's SVP of marketing, had been leading a two-year strategic AI transformation to help the GTM organization work in concert — and by layering Octave into their stack, they were able to quickly pivot to segment marketing at scale.
"Everywhere we deployed AI, we had to deploy a lot of context, and it went stale quickly," Sam says.
Today, WorkSpan uses Octave as a headless GTM context layer that empowers all its people and agents with tailored, just-in-time language for specific accounts, personas, and segments. The company's AI transformation has enabled it to fully embrace a segmented marketing strategy, scale its GTM team's performance, and achieve a 130% and 122% lift on pipeline per marketing dollar and pipeline per BDR, respectively.
When DIY fails
The challenges of vector stores and generic RAG
The GTM team had experimented with homegrown agents and DIY solutions to manage context, including a vector store with OpenAI AgentKit. But updating context in these DIY solutions created as much work as it automated, and they struggled to maintain the breadth and accuracy of responses needed from agents that relied on generic RAG.
"We knew we wanted process in our AI transformation, and were looking for a context home," Sam says. "But we ended up with a lot of small agents and point solutions that we used for different tasks. Much of what marketing built didn't extend into the sales organization. We could see the potential AI had to accelerate our GTM, but it felt like we were doing lots of work to find tactical wins."
"Every single person in go-to-market benefits from Octave. It's the rising tide that's raised all ships."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
Time to value in days
A fast-tracked rollout
To pilot Octave quickly, the Octave team spent a high-impact hour with Sam loading context into Octave through Claude. Then Sam tested the context layer by generating proof of concept assets for segment marketing, sales enablement material, and sample sales collateral. When he previewed the results to WorkSpan's CEO and CIO, they fast-tracked Octave adoption, prioritizing its rollout across the sales team in the next 10 days.
"I was a believer in the first hour. We immediately saw great content using Octave as a context layer that I wasn't seeing from the other context systems we'd tested."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
The test began with Sam connecting Claude and Octave via MCP. He also installed the Octave skills plugin, which helps with Octave library creation (and many other GTM workflows). He gave Claude three days' worth of decks and transcripts from WorkSpan's latest Sales Kickoff event, then Octave broke down the documents into WorkSpan's go-to-market primitives — populating a "dictionary" of segment definitions, buyer personas, product capabilities, current sales plays, and more.
The assets Sam created with this quick onboarding made it clear how quickly Octave could enable the team on the new go-to-market strategy.
"The CEO believed it was possible on Friday, and we started the rollout on Monday," Sam says. "The quality of AI responses was night and day."
Wall-to-wall adoption
Headless context in Octave powers 10+ AI tools and 100% of the WorkSpan GTM team
Today, the entire WorkSpan GTM team uses type 2 context stored in Octave across marketing, demand gen, sales, CS, and enablement. Even product managers access it.
This context source of truth plugs their everyday tools, including Claude, n8n, Canva, Webflow, Instantly, Slack, and Unify — either via Claude or the Octave MCP.
Sam says, "Our relationship with Octave is 95% headless. It's there, running in the background. I run much of my day through Claude connected to Octave. It's the daily harness for our work."
WorkSpan accelerated its adoption of Claude across the GTM team as it centralized on Octave, consolidating one-off licenses to make it the daily system of work.
"Octave caused us to standardize on an AI work surface. If you weren't working out of a Claude instance with Octave plugged in, there was no way to help you be as effective in go-to-market."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
Keeping context current
Easy context maintenance with Claude
Individuals had been managing their own context storage, and Octave centralized this, preventing gaps and drift while saving employees time.
"All my salespeople are sharp," says Sam. "They were working overtime to upload old training documents into personal context folders, copying and pasting text, trying to train AI to help them with deals. When Octave was deployed, they were relieved it wasn't their job anymore. That's when I realized we hit an acceleration point."
Compared to their previous DIY vector store solution, Octave has been easy to maintain. Sam and a small number of product marketers have write access to Octave. Rather than log into the Octave UI to make changes, they typically do so via Claude and the Octave MCP.
For example, a PMM can upload the transcript of a conversation with the product team previewing an upcoming feature release, ask Claude whether the positioning in Octave needs an update, and accept or reject edits.
"We do one-off updates to Octave via the Claude MCP. The more we use Octave across the org, the more incentivized I am to keep updating it. Because now, every time I add context, it compounds."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
Results
A scaled, use case-based go-to-market strategy
WorkSpan's go-to-market teams can now scale up the creation of 1-1, personalized messaging for each account, while also staying within the bounds of the company's top-down marketing strategy for nine segments. This creates consistent messaging across marketing, sales, CS, and product touchpoints. Reps and marketers get just-in-time enablement in Claude, and their agents are enabled too.
As part of the broader AI transformation at WorkSpan, this shift has resulted in a 130% increase in pipeline per marketing dollar and a 122% increase in pipeline per BDR. They estimate up to 50% token savings with Octave compared to alternative context store solutions.
"We hit a point in our AI transformation where we realized that if we got the context layer right, all of our experiments will go faster and all our endpoints will have better outcomes. Now I love investing and improving the context layer in Octave, because it helps my sellers, marketers, and CSMs do better.
That single investment in intelligence at the top pays off when you get the architecture right."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
Marketing use cases
Marketing increases personalized content production
Originally, WorkSpan made a compromise and only marketed to five segments instead of nine, squeezing them together because there was a cap on how much tailored content their marketing team could create.
With Octave, they could undo that compromise.
They've scaled up the production of specialized collateral for nine types of cloud partnerships, including:
- Landing pages
- One-pagers
- Emails
- Enablement training material
- Case studies
Linking Canva to Octave via Claude MCP allows them to design personalized assets quickly.
"With Octave, we've increased our highly tailored marketing to 9 partnership types instead of 5."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
"It's huge for a team of our size to be able to speak to the market with the ambition we have," says Sam. "I was aware that if we over-segmented our go-to-market with a small team, it would break. In the old paradigm, there were constraints around knowledge sharing. But none of that's true anymore if our definitions are in Octave."
Product marketing managers now equip all the field teams and agents at WorkSpan with PMM-approved language via Octave. Powered by this context, WorkSpan's AI transformation has resulted in a 130% increase in pipeline per marketing dollar.
"My content team feels confident marketing into segments now. Before, they would need reviews to confirm they're speaking to a buyer the right way. Now, they have Claude, and Claude is confident because it has Octave."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
Sales use cases
Sales improves win rates through accurate account-specific messaging
When a sales rep asks Claude for information about WorkSpan's product offerings, Octave's opinionated context graph retrieves detailed and accurate information, lending nuance to their interactions and matching the opportunity they're working on with the right use cases and persona group positioning.
"Octave gives you our point of view, not a search result," Sam says. "It knows how we position instead of just what exists in a document."
This improvement in strategic specificity has increased the quality of all sales rep activities, including:
- Generating a business case
- Creating an account plan
- Replying to a competitive-incumbent objection
- Drafting prospecting sequences
For example, reaching out to a lead with, "You're responsible for cloud partnerships at your company," is much less effective than, "You're responsible for AWS partnerships, and AWS has these programs for a company of your size. Which do you participate in?" WorkSpan's BDR manager uses Octave in Claude to stand up all new go-to-market emails and talk tracks in Unify, independent of hands-on PMM support.
Today, if an AE asks Claude, "How should I sell to Snowflake?" Claude will create an account plan that incorporates relevant customer references, Snowflake's potential product use cases, and a relevant sales play — like an AWS migration mandate. All this detail comes from Octave. Importantly, even though its responses are personalized 1-1, Claude isn't reinventing a sales strategy anew for each account because the nine partnerships use cases in Octave provide strategic guardrails.
WorkSpan also uses Octave in n8n workflows — for example, suggesting a sales play for a net-new lead that has shown purchase intent. Before, the n8n node had a block of text explaining possible sales plays, but now, it just references Octave. "The sales play recommendations in our agentic workflow were immediately much better, and we don't need to keep each prompt up to date manually anymore," Sam says.
The sales team achieved their targets within their first quarter with Octave, and the broader AI transformation has resulted in a 122% increase in pipeline per BDR.
"One quarter in, we're beating the sales number, and everybody's giving credit where it's due. The salespeople all feel the quality improvement with Octave, and the CEO says this is the best GTM AI investment we've made."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
Sales enablement use cases
Sales enablement upskills the team instantly
The #1 problem WorkSpan had to solve for when it switched to a partnerships-use-case marketing strategy was that overnight, all their salespeople needed to speak the language of many partnership types. Marketing was stretched to provide that training, until Octave let the sales team access just-in-time enablement through Claude.
The weekly Monday sales enablement call has transformed from a "sit & retain" briefing on product capabilities and market dynamics to an applied session where reps can immediately ask Claude about updated positioning, learn interactively, and apply it within their accounts.
For example, when a new sales play drops — like the AWS partner console migration mandate — the marketing team can add it to Octave, go to Slack, and tell the reps, "hey team, a new play dropped in Octave. When you talk to AWS partner accounts, look out for the console migration play."
"Our sellers would much rather learn by doing than sit through an hour of enablement. We've changed from pushing info on people to letting them pull what they need from Octave, because now it's in their Claude instances—their daily work surface. It's providing ongoing value to sales without marketing being in the room."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
The GTM team has moved evergreen enablement modules (like "Meet Our Buyer") out of training videos, which were costly to maintain and always out of date, and into homegrown activities built with Claude, micro apps, and Octave. For example, they created a Lovable app with an onboarding module for new hires, using Claude as the instructional designer. New rep ramp time improved, and so did the sales team's ongoing ability to speak to many different segments with accuracy.
Product manager use cases
Product managers and marketers align on a company narrative source of truth
As product managers develop new features, they access product positioning in Octave through Claude to write PRDs, refine their work, draft UI copy, and make sure upcoming features align with the current WorkSpan narrative.
Product managers collaborate with product marketing to make sure that Octave's canonical positioning knows what to say to a certain persona about a new feature.
The architectural bet that changed everything
By embracing personalized marketing, guided by a central source of truth for GTM strategy, WorkSpan's AI transformation has succeeded in scaling an efficient GTM team.
Sam says, "My advice to people investing in AI who feel like they're stuck in the proof of concept, pilot phase? If you're focused on outputs and AI applications, look to systems and context foundations to create acceleration. When we made an architectural bet on the intelligence layer at the top, we finally saw compounding results."
"Through our broader AI transformation, we've seen a 130% increase in pipeline per marketing dollar and 122% increase in pipeline per BDR. Octave's context makes that possible."
— Sam Gong, SVP Marketing, WorkSpan
