The go-to-market (GTM) landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. It is moving away from outdated strategies and embracing new imperatives driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and evolving buyer behavior.
Four GTM experts discussed these changes and how to respond to them at “The GTM Revolution Will Not Be Televised” panel during The MarTech Conference last month.
“Artificial intelligence, business-to-consumer marketing tactics and financial accountability are reshaping modern go-to-market, and the skills modern go-to-market professionals need to drive revenue and stay ahead,” said Tim Hillison, Entry Point 1 founder and the panel moderator.
The demise of traditional GTM pillars
The reliance on paid search as the primary engine for lead generation is no longer sustainable.
“We can no longer rely on paid search to be the majority lead generation source,” said Whitney Bouck, managing director of Insight Partners. “It is dead. I can’t say it’s dead dead, but it is not the primary anymore.”
The proliferation of non-search engine resources, like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and AI overviews in search results put it on life support. The result is a significant decline in click-through rates. You need to “diversify your go-to-market channels. Go to where the users are, and that means you have to shape how the AI tools think of and talk about you and your products,” said Bouck.
The change is also driven by a growing sense of customer risk, impacting deal sizes and velocity.
“A marketing team that ignores and doesn’t address customer risk… is just toast,” said Mark Stouse, CEO of Proof Analytics. He said you can see this in the high percentage of deals ending in “no decision.”
The obsolescence of the SaaS model adds to this upheaval. Customers increasingly seek comprehensive solutions over standalone products, said Sangram Vajre, CEO of GTM Partners.
“People are just not trying to buy another hundred thousand dollars of software that requires three people full-time and then a services company that will show you how to implement it,” said Vajre. “So that model is fundamentally broken.”
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Instead, he sees a “rise of service-as-a-software,” where customers demand outcomes and rely on experts to select and manage the necessary tools.
Finally, traditional metrics focusing solely on pipeline volume are misleading.
“Companies that still measure pipeline are flat out wrong,” Vajre said. “Because if the pipeline is not in the right ICP, then you’re having false positives.” He emphasized that “better ICP drives better Net Revenue Retention (NRR).”
The new imperatives
Diversifying GTM channels beyond paid search is critical.
Bouck advised companies to “shape how the AI tools think of and talk about you” by allowing them to crawl content, build citations and backlinks and focus on “generative content optimization as opposed to search engine optimization.”
Addressing customer risk directly in GTM strategies is paramount. Stouse stressed the importance of understanding “how people make a decision, what is influencing them causally, not inferentially. “
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A significant shift toward an outcome-centric approach is also underway. “What does your customer want? They want to go from point A to point B,” said Vajre. “So we are always on this innovation hype of how do we do what we need to do for our customers.”
Whitney Bouck echoed this, stating that good companies aim to “demonstrably and specifically describe the ROI that your customers are getting directly from the products and services that you deliver.”
Artificial intelligence as change agent
AI is a fundamental change agent in GTM. It helps companies “not only do things better, faster, cheaper but do things that we couldn’t do before,” said Bouck. This includes the potential for mass personalization at scale, something previously unattainable. “Mass personalization is here. And if you don’t do it, you lose.”
Vajre highlighted AI’s potential to revolutionize product development by analyzing customer usage patterns to identify needs and suggest new features. “Your AI should be looking at how your customers are using a product at a much massive and much deeper scale in all ways,” he said. That creates a feedback loop, turns into a product, and asks feedback to your customers.”
AI is also driving a power shift from vendors to buyers. Mark Stouse predicted that “marketing automation… is going to be canceled out almost entirely within two years because of the AI-driven stuff [martech is] being loaded with.”
New GTM metrics
The traditional ways of measuring GTM impact are fast becoming obsolete. “The idea that you could measure your way to understanding whether something’s working or not, that’s dead,” said Stouse.
Data alone provides a view of the past and lacks predictive power. Instead, rapid experimentation, enabled by AI, is becoming crucial.
We must move “to an era of rapid experimentation because things are changing so fast,” said Bouck. “You can spin up new things using AI very, very quickly and test whether or not they’re driving engagement and results.”
Causal AI is emerging as a vital tool for understanding the true drivers of GTM success. It “is going to rip the mask off of a lot of things way beyond go-to-market,” said Stouse.
He also pointed out that CEOs and CFOs want more proof of GTM impact: “If you can’t substantiate the fact that it’s contributing to a particular outcome, it will be defunded, period.”
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Focusing on long-term value metrics like NRR is essential for investors and businesses.
Bouck noted that investors look for companies with strong NRR and work to “shape the companies we’ve already invested in to be thinking about those metrics differently.”
What’s ahead
Regarding what to expect, Vajre reiterated that “the service to the software is a real thing. Every company will actually become a services company more than a software company.”
The emphasis on accountability and measurable outcomes will only intensify. Stouse’s prediction of defunding initiatives that lack demonstrable impact underscores this critical shift.
Finally, the era of rapid technological change necessitates continuous learning and adaptation for GTM professionals.
Stouse likened engaging with AI tools to “sitting with an Oxford don in a tutorial,” emphasizing its potential to drive more profound understanding. Vajre echoed this, noting the incredible speed of AI-driven possibilities and the need to “get up to speed on that one.”
The GTM revolution is not a televised event to be watched passively but an active transformation demanding a fundamental reset in strategies, a keen focus on customer value, and an embrace of the power of AI. Companies that adapt to these new realities will thrive.
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