The 2025 State of B2B GTM Report

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC.

And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, independent consultant, and the author of Kellogg.

And together we are the Metrix Brothers.

And we go together like everything and nothing.

Kind of philosophical today, hey, Kak? I mean, we're not getting into Sartre's Being and Nothingness, are we?

Hey, man, human, human beings are condemned to be free, Growth.

Wait, isn't there a Monty Python sketch where they call Jean-Paul Sartre's mom?

Yeah, it's one of my favorite sketches, Ray. And they do call Jean-Paul Sartre's mom, and the conversation goes something like this. Allô, Madame Sartre? Est-ce que Jean-Paul est là? No. Quand sera-t-il libre? Which means, is Jean-Paul at home? No. When will he be free? To which she answers, oh, he's been trying to figure that out for years. So, I've always, always loved that skit. Okay.

Hey, Kaak, why are we talking about nothingness again?

Ah, nothingness. Because it's a theme in go-to-market these days. The Exit 5 newsletter was Recently entitled Nothing Works. And there's a new report out called the 2025 State of B2B GTM by Kyle Poirier and I can't pronounce her name, Maya Vojce. I want to say I probably butchered it. Apologies. That new report is subtitled What's Working in GTM? Anything? So there's this whole notion that kind of nothing's working. So I thought we'd talk about nothingness and then go into this report.

Well, some people might say we talk about nothing a lot, but before we go there, we do that every week, right? Let's dive in. But first, let's hear a word from our sponsors. The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Grothright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for the remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave at Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn at Ray Reich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast.

Okay, so this is a 34-page report, so not, not too hard to review in one treadmill session at the gym. Uh, it's written by Kyle and Maya. It's published October 29th, so relatively fresh off the presses. It's a survey of 195 GTM leaders. It was run in September and October, so it's fresh data. And your typical respondent, I would just say, is small. A typical respondent is between $1 and $10 million in ARR, USA headquarters, hybrid SaaS AI company. So, Ray, do you want to talk a bit about who else is in here?

Yeah, the only thing that jumped out at me was, you know, companies smaller than $10 million, that was 56% of the total population. And then the thing I liked though was that 42% of the population had a greater than $25K annual contract value. So that's kind of that B2B enterprise sweet spot that I love to talk about.

You know, some of the surveys we've analyzed, Ray, will have, you know, an N of 72 or 65. And when you start segmenting those, it gets, you know, uninteresting or, you know, dubious. Where here we got a nice big N of 195, which I like too. And it does cover— it's nicely spread, let's just say. And one of the other things that's spread across is growth rate. So, so the median growth rate grew between 25% and 49%, which is healthy, especially given the size. You want to see a faster growth rate, but you know, you've got a whole mix of 18% flat or negative, kind of scary, uh, and you've got 12% growing at 200+% per year. So I like the fact that it includes a wide range of growers. The other thing that was interesting is they found there was no correlation between sales motion and growth rate, which was interesting. So, they looked at basically the motions, the 5 motions that are the 6 motions they defined: inbound, outbound, PLG, account-based, paid digital, and partners. And they talk about those are the 6 sales motions they defined. And then, they analyze by deal size. And by revenue scale, what's the most popular notion— emotion— notion? And inbound is the winner across 3 of those 6 total buckets. So inbound at 33%, most popular between $5K and $25K ACV. And also by revenue scale, basically everything north of $1 million, the most popular channel is inbound. So, I like that chart. Thoughts on this, Ray?

Yeah, you know, I guess it's because I do some benchmarking myself and I'd like to see those growth rates segmented by both company size and by ACV, which it wasn't. But I did, you know, the thing that really shocked me was when I saw that, that segmentation you talked about by ACV, that inbound was only 16%. And I believe it was the default motion for less than $5K. I'm like, how in the hell could that be? But then I saw, well, PLG is 33%. And at the end of the day, isn't PLG just another way to drive inbound traffic?

Okay, so we're gonna get into the semantics of how they define the motions. So, so yeah, I was not surprised by this for that reason, which is, this is exactly what I expected. For those following along in their Hymn books, we are on slide 8. And for segmented by deal size, the most popular motion for companies less than $5K in average contract value is PLG at 33%. Now, Ray's raising the point of, hey, wait a minute, isn't PLG kind of inbound? Like, who got you to go do the trial? And as a former marketer, it's like, hey, we did, right? Like, we— so, yeah, if I'm equating marketing to inbound, I'm feeling pretty ripped off if I don't get credit for PLG. But I do understand why they segmented. To me, it's just one of these tricky segmentation problems. But yeah, so, so I get what it— we all know what it means, right? That most of our deals are coming from people who ran the trial, 33%. And it does certainly beg the question, well, what got them to run the trial? Was it community? Was it PR? Was it marketing? Was it content marketing? Was it digital ads? Was it partners? Like, which of the other motions got them there?

Well, that's the same thing that jumped out at me was ABX, right? It was 29%. It was the largest Um, I guess go-to-market motion for greater than $25K ACV, but then they have outbound being 21%. And I kind of thought, boy, how do you demarcate ABX, which is primarily outbound, and outbound?

Uh, correct. Okay, Ray has his fangs out today. There's another benchmark in town. Um, yeah, it's a good point, Ray. I don't know, do you— out of curiosity, do you separate this in your stuff? I mean, how do you actually handle that same problem? Because you must face it.

Yeah, we actually do ABX. And when I do an ABX research, I don't ask about outbound because I'm considering ABX as a primary outbound motion, but it's not a complaint. It's just, how did the respondents differentiate ABX versus outbound? That's all I was thinking.

Yeah, that's a really good question. Right. And I like, I like what you're doing there. Put it this way, Ray, I wish everybody, I don't know if you do this, would show the actual question somewhere. So, we know actually what they looked at. Because yeah, if I'm running a marketing team and I'm doing a lot of account-based marketing and somebody asked me about my most popular channel, I could easily just say outbound because outbound is a big part of ABX. In my opinion, they are technically correct. Like I would say, look, account-based marketing is different and outbound is a big part of it. But it's not the same thing. And you can certainly do outbound without doing account-based marketing.

That's right.

That's what my son does. We've talked about my son before. He's a SDART ramp. And he does outbound and there's no ABX, right? It's just kind of Darwinian, Darwinian outbound where they're all just calling into these accounts. So, but I hear you, I hear you. And the important part where the rubber meets the road is what's in the mind of the person filling out the instrument, which is why I wish people would show us their questions so we could actually dig deeper.

I actually found chart 9 was pretty interesting. You want to kick that one off?

Sure. Look, this is— well, we're going to talk a lot about benchmarking technique today, I think. But this kind of question scares me a little bit. Or I wouldn't say it scares me, but you have to be careful how you interpret the answer to this kind of question. And the question is, what is your top priority across a given list of challenges? Now, I'll read some of them: scaling GTM motions and pipeline, increasing conversion rates, GTM efficiency, Positioning and messaging, competitive differentiation, pricing and packaging, becoming AI native, whatever that means. Because I think that one might relate to positioning and messaging. But in any case, those are the challenges. And you ask somebody which one's top. And you got to be very careful that there's a difference between everybody's second challenge and the runner-up for top challenge. It may not be the same. Right? You're not automatically going to get a correct ordering. You will get— and 36% of the people said their top challenge was scaling GTM and pipeline. By contrast, only 9% said competitive differentiation was a top challenge. And just to be clear, it might be everybody's second challenge and get no votes, right?

Yeah.

And that will be lost with this kind of questioning technique.

But I will tell you, you think about what Exit 5 said, like nothing's working. Almost every client I work with, pipeline generation is a big challenge. They're just not meeting their goals. Their pipeline coverage ratio is not where it needs to be. So when I saw that the number one priority was to scale existing GTM motions and pipeline, I'm like, if it's not working, why is scaling what you're doing more important than figuring out what will work? Does that make sense?

Well, 2 reasons. Yeah, it does make sense. I'll give you my answer. Um, look, the art of this kind of question— we're going to get a lot into survey design, but, but Ray does it for a living and I've done a lot of it myself— is you got to be— when you create this kind of mutually exclusive exhaustive taxonomy of challenges, right? And this is neither, is part of the problem. Uh, you know, people don't know where to put stuff. Like, there's no box called finding shit that works, right? And Ray is basically arguing, I think, that there should have been one, and he thinks it would have scored really high. But I'm going to argue back that given that there isn't one, if I just need more pipeline, I'm picking the one called scaling GTM motions and pipeline. And I may even leave out the words scaling pipeline check. That would be the way I would read this. Like, I need more pipeline. And I would click— Because tell me, if that's your number one challenge, Which other box would you click? Right? None of them. So, I agree with you that pipeline is the problem. I recently wrote a post called Navigating the Pipeline Crisis. And I don't like to be dramatic, but I called it pipeline crisis. And I fully agree with what you said.

Okay. But what I really liked was this slide. And I think it was the slide where it has all the different distractions of GTM activities. I looked at that. So, this eye chart, it's like, Why are people doing so many different activities?

So this is, you remember what onomatopoeia is, Ray? Does that word mean anything to you?

I do. I learned it in 11th grade English.

Hey, so like bees are buzzing, right? Where the word sounds like what it is. Well, this is a distraction chart that is actually pretty distracting, right? In my mind, the way they've laid it out. So in this chart, what they're showing is about 15 different channels. And some of them look a lot like what we'd call channels. And I want to say customer acquisition channels because I hate using the word channel by itself because it could be distribution channel. It could be some other sort of channel. So, these are in my mind customer acquisition channels. And there's about, I think there's 15 of them if I did the math right.

There's actually 18.

Oh, 18. I missed a row.

And by the way, for everyone, this is slide 12 in the report.

Oh, thank you, Ray. And it seems to be laid out, Ray, in decreasing sorted order from left to right, then up, then down. So, it goes across, then down. And it would say that the most popular core activities are LinkedIn, 66% say it's core. SEO, 53% say it's core. Warm outbound, 48% says it's core, which of course does beg the question, how'd they get warm? See other debate. Um, 4th, large conferences at 47%. 5th, intimate in-person events at 43%. And paid ads at 43%. So what do you think about this chart, Ray?

Well, I like it. It does show all the noise. But, you know, I like to look at math when I see that, hey, 66% say they're doing this, 53%, 48%, 43%. And when I add them all up, it's like Oh my God, are the— are companies really investing this much time in 16 different channels?

Well, that's one of their conclusions, Ray. That is one of their conclusions from the survey, uh, which is the average company has 5 core ones and 5.5 experiments, and they think that's too much, right?

Yeah. And then the other thing I'd say about this, like, things like big product launches I'm like, okay, maybe this is for PLG where a big product launch is a big part of the messaging and positioning and it drives people. But some of these in my mind weren't really channels. They were more tactics or strategies.

Yeah. I mean, once again, the kind of the semantics on this stuff gets tricky. Some of them pretty clearly are channels like the customer acquisition channels like SEO. You know, PR by comparison is not traditionally a customer acquisition channel, but it does generate leads. Right? As a byproduct, I would argue, right? AI SDR. Okay. They're typically inbound. So, they're not really a channel either, right? Outbound SDRs would be a channel in my mind. Inbound SDRs are just lead processing, right? So, it's a little weird. And they put TikTok there, which happily only 2% said is core. I was kind of even surprised to see it there at all. So, I think we should move on to what I think is the money slide of the whole report, worth the price of admission on its own, which is slide 13. Which is the GTM scorecard. It's not really a scorecard. It's kind of like the GTM Magic Quadrant, although Gartner would probably sue them if they called it that. But it's a 2x2 matrix. It's got likelihood of having a big impact on the y-axis, up-down. And it's got popularity across B2B tech on the x-axis. And high and to the right, that upper right corner, they call tried and true. And I'll just tell you what's in there and we can talk about it. Intimate events, glad to see it. They're a go-to for me. Founder brand, glad to see it. By the way, only at small companies. If they do a segmented version of this later where the companies are bigger, founder brand drops out. But at little companies, founder brand is up there. Intent-based inbound, all day long. Large conferences, I like them and they can be cost-effective if you execute them properly, in my opinion. Warm outbound, very, very good. Who warmed them up in the first place. SEO, surprisingly resilient here. Not sure what you think about that. And then LinkedIn, which is and rightfully should be in that top right. Thoughts?

Well, the one thing I would say is I like the chart. I was surprised that ABX wasn't there because we had ABX earlier on. And I'm like, okay, how do you define ABX versus warm outbound? So, I was kind of sad to miss, not see that. And the other thing I would have loved to seen this. Not only broken out by size of company, but by ACV. As an example, intimate events, hey, those are expensive and it's great for a $25,000 or higher product. Probably not a good one for a $5K product, right?

So I'm just counting dots here, Ray. I hadn't realized, but there are by my count only 17 dots, which ABX either got left out or lost in the fray. I don't know which. So I didn't hear your question because I was counting dots. Apologies.

No, I just said intimate events for me. Yeah, that's great for an enterprise-type sale, at least $25,000 or above. You're probably not going to be doing intimate events for a $5K product. So all I said was I'd love to see this broken out by ACV as well as ARR.

Yeah, I got it. Good, good feedback. Absolutely true. I, I default to kind of mid-market plus, as you know. Uh, so in most of my world, we're selling at $25K plus. And sometimes a lot bigger than that. And intimate events are awesome. Again, customer acquisition channel. I love intimate events. But a good intimate event to me, I'll just tell you one of my favorite formulas. It's got a few existing customers, a few high-value prospects, a few execs, and maybe an industry influencer, big-name watcher who who does kind of a 15-minute dinner speech and that's it. So, I got a mix. So, I'm not driving volume, right? I might not even be driving new business. I am driving conversion rate in my mind. Like the purpose of that event is to make the 3 prospects there go, wow, I want to buy from this company, right? None of them might be new to the funnel. In fact, I mean, you might get 1 or 2. But in my experience, it's usually not for people we don't know. It's for people we've already found. And are very high value in the funnel because, because I got 10 other sales reps with 10 other high-value people fighting to get in.

Totally agreed. But hey, one of the things I really would love to cover is kind of where folks are betting big going forward, and that's on slide 18. You mind if we cover that one?

Take the lead there, Ray. I can if you want, but go ahead. I think you got something to say.

So it's a, you know, the title is Folks Are Betting Big on AI Search and Intent, but specifically 51% of companies saying they're going to increase their investment in AEO, answer engine optimization. I'm like, wait a minute, that wasn't even on the 18 in the previous slides. Now you could say, hey, Ray, it's just another type of search.

Hey, you're out, man. This is Ray in a bad mood.

It's another type of search, right? But it was really cool to see that everyone who said they're doing too much I'm now going to do one more thing in a very big way, which is AI search, AEO.

That's what jumped out at me here. It's funny, Ray, you're much better than I am at kind of cross-checking this thing. I didn't realize the dot was missing. I didn't realize that wasn't one of the channels. So, but what I was not surprised about was that AEO was top of the list, right? That AEO matters a ton. I think it's more winner-take-all, in my opinion. Search, there kind of is a consolation prize. You could be on the second page of results. Yeah, nobody goes to it. You can be below the fold, right? But there's no consolation prize. If you ask ChatGPT to make a list of 5 vendors to look at, there's no 6th, right? You're either on the list or you're not. And so I feel like in a winner-take-all world, it's even more winner-take-all than search. So I do think it's worth looking at. Looks like you wanna say something else, go.

And that's why slide 19, for me, this is the money slide because I believe it's winner-take-all also. And AEO is so critical. And it really gives you some recommendations on how to really improve or optimize your AEO results. I really like slide 19.

Yeah, I agree with you. If I only had 2 slides to pick from the deck, it would be the quadrant earlier on slide 12 or 13 and this kind of AEO primer here on slide 19. I want to highlight a couple of the points made. I know we're getting close on time, but assume zero-click. If you've not looked at Rand Fishkin's posts on zero-click marketing, you should. But basically assume they're not going to— They're not going to click through to anybody's website. And I think we're all seeing that in our direct traffic. And then you can measure how well you're doing indirectly, even if you share voice in LLM queries, which I don't know how to measure. I'd be curious if you do. Branded search volume, which we do know how to measure, and self-reported attribution, which I'm a huge believer in, is just asking people, how'd you hear about us? I'll hit the other points and then come back to you, Ray. Optimize for ChatGPT. I totally agree. This would be like, should I optimize for Google or Bing? You know, it's like, don't think real hard, Google. That's the way I feel. Maybe you feel differently. Decide your must-win prompts. That's very familiar. We had to do that in SEO. They mentioned some tools. I don't know. Well, I know Ahrefs, but Profound and AirOps, don't know those tools. CrossFunnel to help you decide your must-win prompts. But that whole process, it's kind of like picking your must-win keywords, right? Write specialized specific content. The structure of content's a big thing. I always felt, Ray, that Wikipedia was like the perfect marriage to Google. Like Google Search wanted a page to point at. And I worked at the New York Times during that era because they were one of my customers. And they were so frustrated that they have all this content on John F. Kennedy, but it wasn't structured into one page, right? It was in 15 different articles and Wikipedia had it structured well in one page and Google picked it, right?

Yeah.

And I feel like the FAQ is, is the wiki page equivalent. Like, just like Google loved to point at Wikipedia pages, answer engines love to pull from FAQs à la Reddit, right? This is kind of a FAQ. People are talking about questions and answering either facts off a website or even product reviews, which are kind of a FAQ. So thoughts, Ray?

Well, you said the 2 things. I think if you're going to really focus on AEO and B2B software, Reddit and G2 are 2 critical places to make sure you're showing up.

Yep. Reviews and facts, basically. Viewing Reddit as a broad open FAQ. But why? Because people ask questions, right? And questions get answers. So if your content is naturally structured between question and answer, it's kind of like Google wants to find words on pages. Wikipedia is great for that. Answer engines want to find answers to questions. So structure your content in that way.

In fact, one of the, maybe, maybe one of the last questions we need to ask is another great slide, slide 28. Do you think we wrap up with that?

I think if 28 is what I think it is, Ray, yes, that's a perfect one to wrap up. I was going to go, sorry, Ray, I'm going to do 29. Ooh. So yeah, 28.

Must-try tools.

Yeah. Well, cause I think people, for the audience, 28 is the most impactful GTM tools. Of 2025. And in order, the top 5 are ChatGPT, HubSpot, Clay, Claude, LinkedIn. In my mind, no surprises. The next 5, for what it's worth, are Apollo, Gong, Notion, Sixth Sense, and N8N. So that's interesting, but I think the most interesting one is what should people try? And that's slide 29. And I'll just read the list. There's 22 answers to this, so we're not going to get them all. But number 1, Clay, right? Data automation engine for enrichment, outbound, and personalized workflows. 2, Lovable. So you can ship basically apps as a vibe coding tool. N8n, open source automation for kind of orchestrating GTM systems. Instantly, which I don't know, but I believe it's AI-powered high-volume cold outreach. ChatGPT, which we all know. Sora, which is video generation. Replit, which is again a Vibe coding environment for building lightweight apps. Apollo is next, an outbound platform with data sequences, dialing, and enrichment. And I guess, well, there's 9 and 10. HeyReach, LinkedIn automation, and Keyplay. Well, I gotta mention 11 because I used it a long time ago, User Gems, which tracks people as they got across jobs. Thoughts on this, Ray?

Yeah, all I'll say on slide 29, this is not your father's RevTech stack. This just shows you how quickly the primary revenue technologies, now called GTM tools, has changed. Like when I saw Lovable, it's like, how in the hell are companies using Lovable and all the vibe coding? And I started doing a lot of, you know, discussions and I'm like, wow, it is popular. Yeah.

And this is why I prefer slide 29 to slide 28. Like if, if I were using my precious time as a CMO to figure out what to try next year, Well, I'd look at them both, but I'd look at 29 first. And by the way, 28 is a little bit your father's ETM stack, GTM stack. It's not entirely. You've got Clay and ChatGPT on there, but you have old standbys like HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce on there. You've got Adeo on there, a Balderton company, which I really like, which is kind of a roll-your-own CRM, which I think is a very cool product. You've got some newer stuff like Figma on there. You've got some old classics like Outreach. But you got qualified, up and coming. So, so these are both good lists, but, but if I only had one, I'd look at side 29. Ray, do you want to wrap us up?

Yeah, I think, hey, everybody who's thinking about their GTM tool investment next year and your program investment, go ahead and grab this report. You know, it's the GTM 2025 report from Kyle, and I won't pronounce her name incorrectly, but it's a great report to really think about how you're going to invest your focus and dollars of budget next year.

Thanks a lot, Ray, and thanks to people for joining us. The Metrics Brothers: AI, SaaS, and More is a production of The Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC and a member of the Benchmarkit Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that The Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided or the humor content of the jokes told. Ray? Information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional or for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X @rayreich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X @davekellogg. Kellogg. Schedectity, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production location. Thanks for listing.