This article is based on a presentation given by Guy Mounier at #GTM23 in San Diego. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your GTM Blueprint dashboard.
Want to learn all about the AI-powered future of Go-to-Market (GTM)? You’ve come to the right place!
Here’s a taste of what we’ll cover:
- Today’s GTM challenges,
- The future of Go-to-Market,
- What the revenue tech stack will look like three to five years from now,
- What GTM automation is (Spoiler alert: It's an emerging category that'll appear on G2 by early next year) and how it will make your life easier.
Let’s get into it.
Today’s GTM challenges
First, a quick question: Do any of these challenges sound familiar to you?
- Your marketing team is being asked to provide more and more leads.
- You’re missing out on revenue opportunities due to a lack of brand awareness.
- Your outreach efforts aren’t sufficiently targeted.
- Your network of clients and prospects isn’t being systematically engaged.
- Your organization doesn’t get back in touch with past clients who’ve changed jobs as quickly as possible.
- Your outbound messaging isn’t personalized enough.
- You need to optimize the way you cross-sell new solutions offerings to existing clients.
If so, you’re not alone. I asked this question at a conference of GTM experts recently and all of these challenges were mentioned. But the frontrunners – by a long way – were missed revenue opportunities due to a lack of brand awareness, and the struggle to personalize outbound messaging at scale.
Thankfully, these challenges could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to our good friend AI.
The future of GTM: Nearbound marketing
Now, you may or may not have heard the term 'nearbound' being whispered in marketing circles – but what does it mean?
In a nutshell, nearbound means the ability to do personalization at scale when you engage with clients and prospects. It's an evolution from one-size-fits-all outbound marketing, which evolved from old-fashioned “spray-and-pray” inbound marketing.
As with so many advances in our field, nearbound engagement has been made possible by technology – a beautiful convergence of generative AI and hyper-automation.
The future of your revenue tech stack
So, thanks to technology, the way we engage with clients and prospects is evolving rapidly, but what does that mean for our revenue tech stacks?
Well, first up, we’re going to see much more consolidation of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. More and more companies like HubSpot and Salesforce are standardizing and decomplexifying offerings with out-of-the-box modules as opposed to best-of-breed modules, making their tools both easier to maintain and more integrated.
Another emerging trend in revenue tech stacks is Go-to-Market automation. This consists of three major components. Let’s take a look at each of them.
Go-to-Market whitespace
In the next three to five years, we’ll be using automation more and more to identify our GTM white spaces – those untapped opportunities to help potential customers meet their unspoken needs. To do this, Go-to-Market automation will allow us easier access to anyone who’s in the market, as well as prospects in our strategic networks.
It's all about expansion, whether into greenfield areas or new international markets. Opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, expanding into new verticals, and going up-market or down-market will all be at our fingertips.
Go-to-Market motions
The next thing that’s changing is GTM motions. We’re already starting to see the emergence of virtual assistants helping to accelerate Go-to-Market motions.
They’re accelerating inbound motions in the form of virtual agencies, outbound motions in the form of virtual SDRs, and channel-led motions via virtual relationship brokers.
Product-led and audience-led motions are evolving rapidly, too. In the product-led category, tools are being developed to help you detect free users who have a high propensity to become paid users. In the audience-led category, as you track your audience through the engagement funnel, you’re now able to dynamically push tailored content to them, based on their level of engagement.
All these motions can be accelerated by AI.
Go-to-Market playbook
Finally, who could forget the Go-to-Market playbook? Traditionally, this has contained everything go-to-market teams need to know about their target accounts, ideal customer profiles, buyer personas, competitors, partners, and so on.
These days, advanced AI-powered software can help you automate the process of assembling all this information and keeping it up to date.
Go-to-Market automation in action
Let me show you what Go-to-Market automation looks like in action.
It starts with lots of data. If you want to uncover every sales opportunity and eliminate blind spots, you need to know what your clients are doing and saying online.
We're talking about a billion behavioral data points gathered from virtually every country in the world – what they’re searching for, websites they’re visiting, who they’re connecting with on LinkedIn, who they’re hiring, job changes, ads they’re clicking on, and more.
All that behavioral data is tailored specifically to your GTM. It identifies things like who’s in the market to buy, key stakeholders at target companies, the actual people doing research (maybe they’re connecting with competitors on LinkedIn), and any risks you should be aware of, like competitors or disengaged decision-makers. We call these “signals” that help uncover your Go-to-Market whitespace.
You don’t want to overload your marketing and sales teams, so instead you can use virtual assistants (at Aptivio, we call them “digital twins”) to send personalized outreach at scale using the data. They can send warm introductions, incorporating past interactions and any relevant client signals. This is how you personalize LinkedIn InMails, email, and soon voice outreach at scale, powered by the digital twin.
While your digital twin oversees outreach, you can focus on more strategic work, like requesting introductions, de-risking forecasts, and launching targeted campaigns.
Attribution and accountability in the future of GTM
The future of ROI in sales is user attribution to revenue. Think of the stages in a typical sales funnel – targeted, aware, engaged, interested, forecasted, closed won. User attribution shows which salesperson or marketer moved an opportunity from one stage to the next across all campaigns, outbound, and go-to-market activities.
For example, you can measure things like how much a certain team or piece of technology increased the number of sourced opportunities. From there, you can see how many accelerated opportunities can be attributed to specific users or activities. It’s all quantified in black and white. With AI, there’s complete transparency into go-to-market performance.
The future of go-to-market accountability is understanding both sides of the funnel – buyer behavior through the sales stages, and which members of your go-to-market team helped progress the deal through that engagement funnel.
This level of transparency doesn’t really exist today but, thanks to AI, we’re going to see more and more of it in the very near future, giving us a complete picture of what’s working at each step of the sales process.
The future of go-to-market organizations
These days, we hear a lot of talk about AI taking people’s jobs, but AI is actually a copilot that elevates our work. It handles repetitive tactical tasks so we can focus on strategy, marketing, selling, relationships, and closing deals.
In three to five years, virtual assistants will be the norm. Here are just some of the ways they’ll help us raise our GTM game:
- Virtual sales coaches will help you with deal strategy and soft skills like negotiation, communication, and stress management.
- Virtual SDRs will be able to handle emails and outbound targeting including via LinkedIn InMails and voice messages.
- Virtual agencies will be able to create campaigns – including images and messages – and continually A/B test and optimize them.
- Virtual relationship brokers will connect with past customers, former colleagues, and partners in your network to identify opportunities and make recommendations for warm introductions.
These virtual assistants will become part of your org:
- Go-to-market leaders overseeing territories
- Go-to-opportunity leaders (marketers, sellers, CSMs) shepherding deals through the funnel
- AI copilots handling repetitive, structured tasks
The martech landscape is converging around CRM stacks like Salesforce and HubSpot, with pure-play vendors struggling to compete. This means that five years from now, we’ll have much simpler tech stacks to manage.
Go-to-market automation is likely to follow a similar route to CRMs, so we’ll see more and more consolidated solutions in the next five years. While there are many point solutions for GTM automation today, my company Aptivio has an 18-month head start with an end-to-end solution. This will be benchmarked by Go-to-Market Partners and G2 very soon, marking the start of a new era in GTM automation.
Key takeaways
Personalization is the future – there’s no doubt about it. We hear this loud and clear from clients. The days of spamming clients are over; you need to build relationships and nurture with empathy.
When you interact with someone, find a recent event or signal that gives a genuine, personalized reason to connect. Don't just email them again because it's been a week since the last one – people will see right through that.
The future is building digital empathy through data-driven, personalized outreach. If you take just one lesson away from this article, make it that one.
