Fireside Chat: The GTM Singularity: Why the Old Rules Are Collapsing – and What Comes Next

Now we have the pleasure of speaking with David Franklin. He is a senior research director at Forrester. Welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

What is on your mind right now?

We just came off of our B2B Summit. And so that is swirling around in my head, all of the feedback we got there. So if you don't know our B2B Summit, we had about 1,500 delegates. We had about 1,800 people total on site. All from various go-to-market functions. We introduced this notion of what we call GTM Singularity, and then sort of what companies need to do about it. And the feedback was overwhelmingly, I'd say two things. One, I wouldn't have known what to call it, but this is how I've been feeling. Thank you for putting a name on it. Whether you love or hate the name, at least it's a name. And then two, It's great to know I'm not on, I'm not the only one. Like, I'm not alone. Everybody is it. This, this is a phenomenon as opposed to this is an observation. The feedback was, was just incredible. The number of companies sort of saying, yep, this is, this is what we're dealing with. It feels different. We sort of made the point that AI is not the story. AI is a catalyst. It's changing everything, but it's the, what we need to do is where we're focused.

So let's define the word singularity because I have a hunch that maybe hit hitchhiking on Ray Kurzweil's book Singularity.

There's a lot of definitions of singularity. We went to the sort of traditional math science definition, which is essentially it's, it's a point in time when new and mounting pressures cause existing rules and models to collapse and new ones to emerge. We sort of said you can look at this from a macroeconomic point of view, even go back to sort of, you know, the pandemic. All of the economic uncertainty in the world right now, the geopolitical tensions in the world right now, how we've changed as, as employees, like working models and work from home, hybrid teams are more separated. So for a seller, used to be able to show up on site, bring the whole team together. Now they're dispersed. We're all— so take that macroeconomic environment and a whole bunch of other things that are, that are out in the world, right? Then buyer changes. So we do, we do an annual survey we call Buyer Insights Survey. It's, it ranges each year, but it's between 16,000 and 19,000 buyers, somebody who's bought a significant purchase, business buyers in the previous 12 months. And we dig in and we get phenomenal data. And for the last few years, we've been noting these, these pretty significant shifts. One of the things we've talked about is the buying group and the buying network. So our most recent data showed that there are 13 members of an internal buying group and 9 additional members of a buying network on average by company size, by industry, whatever the offering was that was being purchased, that varies. But on average, it's 13 plus 9. The access to information, again, driven by AI, but it's the information I can access when I can access it, my ability to interrogate it. We refer to what we call the visibility vacuum. Folks are showing up much later in the purchase cycle, much more informed, much more deliberate on what they're trying to do. We see this risk aversion growing. Every decision now, or every investment is a, is a sort of mission-critical decision. So we're seeing, again, in that data, we are seeing a rise in the number of pilots and trials. Sales cycles are longer. Like, that's just our new normal. And then that's, that's all what's going on. Plus AI, or some of it driven by, but AI is the thing that's making this moment in time, making these models, our traditional models and rules collapse, right? AI automation.

With all the acceleration of data and information flowing faster, being available to everybody at the same time, why is it that decision-making has slowed down? Sales cycles have expanded.

For a few years, we've been seeing buyers getting younger, the buying network and buying group expanding. We can't say for certainty that younger buyer inside their organization they're the buyer, but are they more, are they more risk-averse? They're afraid to take that leap. It may be their first time going through this process. There's a lot riding on this decision. We think the age is a factor in this. We can't say it's everything. I think the expansion of buying network, buying groups is a factor. The other thing I think is depending on what it is, what the offering is being sold, I think a lot of, a lot of the, the lines between areas, and this is especially true, I think, in tech. The lines are blurring. What, what we used to be fairly clear, you know, my stack was in this area and now it's kind of like, well, this, this does some of that. We've actually seen some of our waves, we're collapsing them because the categories don't make, two separate categories don't make sense anymore. So we've been, we've been noticing a higher percentage of that. So I think just making that, this understanding what's going on in the world so that I can make the best decision. Is harder. Predicting what's coming next is, is really, really hard right now. So if I'm investing in this, I'm investing for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. I don't think anyone's investing in, it's hard to think about what I'm investing in now as a 10-year investment because everything's just changing so fast.

Maybe our sales model is broken because if we sell to one person and that person has 13 other people inside and 9 people outside, We're selling maybe to the wrong person.

That's part of the challenge for a seller today is identifying who is playing what role in this. First of all, knowing that they're part of that buying group and then understanding their role in the buying group, then understanding their needs as it relates to that, right? So that's information needs. It's whatever that might be that different people have different needs. And then add on to that, they're doing a lot, the buyer is doing a lot of that research themself. They're showing up much, much later in the process. 68% of the time they have a preferred buyer in mind. 80% of the time that buyer is winning. Maths out to 55% of the time the decision is made before you even know this buyer's in market.

You say that buying has become an act of confirmation.

Confirmation. That's the whole point, right?

Yeah.

Yep. So that's from that. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of, that's the thing is if I'm coming into it, if 55% of the time The winning provider is the one I'm coming in expecting to win. That is a confirmation, right? More than half the time, it's a confirmation exercise. But that means for a seller, we have to, to your point of what's broken, we have to rethink how we're engaging with these companies, how we're influencing them earlier. So one of the things that Ian Bruce and Kelvin Ji spoke about at Summit is this notion of rethinking the demand and brand conversation, bringing those together into a preference conversation. Like, how do we increase, treat preference as something as a, as a goal so that you up your odds of being in that either the 68% and therefore hopefully the 55% of the selected vendor because you don't get to have that conversation. You don't just shape the conversation, shape what they want to buy. If they're so far along before you start to engage with them, then you're answering questions, then you're giving details, then you're proving what it says out there as opposed to helping, trying to understand what the client need is, helping them figure out if we're the right solution, all those sorts of things. It's, it's getting harder and harder to do that when, when they're invisible until until they've pretty much made a decision.

You also talk about the 3 illusions that go-to-market teams cling to: control, credibility, and confidence. Which one is most dangerous here?

If you catch any buyer, any seller, and their especially demand colleagues in marketing, I think, I think most people would admit we haven't really been in control for quite a while. It's been a, you know, the buyer is in control. It's just that we didn't change our behavior to reflect that. And that was a, again, big message for us is some of this stuff might sound obvious, but how's it going, right? If you're aware of it, what have you changed as a result of it? If someone's invisible, what confidence do you have? It's hard to have that confidence if you're not aware of what's going on out there, right? So like I say, they're connected, but to me it's, it's as much the, okay, if this is true, then what do we do differently? We, we have to change what we do. And that's the part we don't see everybody doing. And that was one of the things we said is, is sort of, if this sounds obvious, have you done something about it? Or it's just like you nod and keep going. We don't think you're gonna be able to paper over the cracks anymore. And that's the singularity part, right? This is the, the rules and, and the, the norms and the practices that we've, we've lived by. Aren't working, we gotta change.

So how do you sell in a playing field where most of the influential people that impact the decision are invisible?

I mean, one of the first things is to again, acknowledge it and then step back from it and think about what you need to do. Treat visibility as a KPI. If visibility goes away, you have to sh— sh— he used this whole analogy and it's like sharpen your other senses. What do people feel? Thinking about, about again, preference, coming in earlier in that process, measuring it, watching to see what changes it, doing more of what changes it for the positive.

You also talk in the report about the ARC framework. What does that mean? Explain it.

I made the point, and one of the things I said is these aren't homilies, right? This is what we heard from everyone we interviewed. Like, what do you need to do differently? So these are the principles versus the approaches. On those, ARC stands for augmented, Resilient and collaborative. So I'll go through them all by one if that's helpful. So augmented is the, it's the practice of combining human and AI to maximize company and customer value. So there's a couple of things in there, right? So it's the connecting AI and agents to deliberately to market initiatives and use cases, treating buyer agents as first-class members of the buying network and thinking about your if you're, if you're building agents or whatever way you're using AI, sort of thinking about how to align that by domain and focus area and business outcome, thinking about the data that we're providing to the, thinking about data we produce as being for both the human and the machine, right? So for, from the machine point of view, it has to be accurate and consistent and obviously relevant. And that's easier said than done. Most organizations have a, have a total sprawl of content that contradicts, that's, that's not up to date, that isn't, isn't consistent, in some cases isn't accurate. And then it's the other part of that statement I made is sort of the value for the customer side of this, right? So if you're doing this and, and coming at it from the point of view of how do we ensure our AI investments serve a long-term business need by putting the customer at the center of them. So that's augmented. Resilient. This was a word we sort of came up with. So first of all, resi— what we mean by resilient is sort of the ability to absorb market shocks and continuously adapt processes. So most organizations, let's be honest, they update their go-to-market plans annually at best. But, you know, with that, that, that buyer behavior shifting and all of that volatility, we can't have these static plan plans. We have to be able to adapt sort of thing. So we do every year, we do a pretty significant customer obsession body of research. Again, we go out and survey thousands of people and we assess how customer obsessed their organizations are. And then we do data cuts where we sort of segment them into 5 stages of obsession. And the ones that are, that we consider customer obsessed, one of our statements this year was B2B customers that are customer obsessed are built to bend, not break. And so one, like what we called out was things like, like they anchor their decision in customer needs. They maintain budget flexibility. They focus on building trust. They invest in new technologies. And so it's sort of that rapid ability to, to, to sort of shift and adapt. And then the collaborative one, again, it sounds obvious. One thing we made a point of though is this isn't just marketing and sales. This is the entire go-to-market function. It's marketing, sales, customer success, product in particular, and extends beyond that, right? So, and this isn't about rules of engagement. This is about thinking and acting interdependently. So leaving no gap between sort of the priorities, the plans, the activities, the metrics that each group is using, making sure those— that they're obviously going to be slightly different because we're doing different activities, but making sure, like I say, that they're interdependent.

So let's talk about buying agents. Since when have they appeared in your reports and your analysis?

So it's probably been about a year and a half that they've appeared, pure buying agents. They're not pervasive today. It's frankly, it's hard to find examples of where they're pervasive and successful and, and, and, you know, when we look for, let's go write the case study on it, let's use the example of they're hard to find, but we are very confident that it'll probably start off initially as they'll be doing parts of the buying process. Like I will use my, I'll build an agent in Copilot or whatever it might be to go and do something. And then. It's gonna be quite a while in the B2B world that until we just let go, right? If ever. But could it do a chunk? I mean, are, is it able to do a chunk today? Sure. You know, people are building agents on a daily basis. Some of those agents are more automation prompts, if we're honest, versus true agents. But there's a lot of people starting to think about how does this come into play? And again, if I'm doing all this research and thinking about what's the right provider for me before I reach out to the various providers that I might have shortlisted, that's where we see a lot of usage. Do I call that a buying agent? Not fully today, but definitely think it's coming.

What's your recommendation for sales managers to prepare for, uh, the sales organization to deal with agents, uh, buying agents, uh, properly and effectively?

Don't ignore them. Don't cut them off. I used the phrase earlier, sort of thinking of them as first-class members of the buying network. Like we put them, so when we did a buying the buying group and buying network graphics, we sort of have the buying group at the center and the individual buyer at the center of that. So it's sort of, it's concentric circles except the outside is almost more like petals that there's a bunch of different things, right? You have influencers, you have existing customers that might be influencing that, you have partners that might be influencing it. And that's where we sort of think of the buyer agent is part of that buying network. So treat them as that. That means you have to give them information. But you have to think about what you're giving them, how you're giving it to them. Some of that is easy, right? So you want case studies? I can give you case studies. Am I giving you the right case study? It's not as easy as it sounds, but it's easy to, to make the decision to say we should be giving information about the successes our customers have had. It wants pricing information. Well, how do I know it's a buying agent, not a competitive agent? There's degrees of, of, but comfort and security and governance that has to go into all of these decisions. It's not just a, yeah, come on in, look at everything we've got. It has to be done thoughtfully and planfully. So if anyone is looking to that, I would sort of say reach out to Rick and team and they can help much more than I can. I can tell you what's needed, they can tell you how.

In your report, you warn against companies that over-rotate on internal productivity At the expense of customer value. What does that mean?

One of Forrester's core, like, most important things that we anchor on is customer obsession. So I referenced it already, right? And so what we see is a lot of companies, especially at a time of change, there's a tendency to say we should reorg. We should sit down and think about the rules of engagement between our groups. We should rethink our process. As opposed to let's look outside in. What do customers need? How are they engaging with us? How can we make that a more seamless process? As one of my colleagues says, the best two answers you can get from a prospect is yes and no. Like if we are not right for you, that's okay. Let's not waste your time and our time on that either, right? So, it's sort of the, if we can better understand the customer need, understand our ICP, making sure that that's aligned with our messaging, getting that in front of the right people, helping Drive that preference earlier. That's all about putting the customer need first. What we see too many companies do is the, well, this should report up to here and we need a new way of that. And start with the customer needs. And then if you need to change things, great, because you're doing that in response to it. It's just the way too often we see the, we're reorging again because we swung too far that way. We swung too far this way and it's every 18 months. We're gonna, we're gonna be centralized. We're gonna be decentralized. Kind of, kind of approach. We're gonna go after verticals, we're gonna go after geographies, we're gonna go after this. Understand the customer, understand how you engage with them, understand who does that best, identify their need. Again, it's all the stuff we, we, we try to do, we know we should do, but sometimes we get it, get in our own way.

So what you're saying is in all those shifts, uh, they become internally focused and forget about the customer.

Mm-hmm.

What's a good book you recommend for learning more about customer obsession?

So I would say there's a lot of Forrester reports that are all about— so we do an annual state of customer obsession. Actually, it was two former colleagues that wrote a book called Outside In. So everything I've just been talking about, if you think about it, too many companies are inside out. It's our process, it's our org, it's our whatever versus the outside in. So that's to some extent, that was a— it's an older book now, but the concepts of that from a book point of view, it still holds up really, really strong.

Let's get back to another Forrester data point that I'm fascinated by, which is that 14% of enterprises found that the risk that managers say they are willing to take, they're not willing to take big risks. Mm-hmm. So that, that study shows something about the mindset of leaders out there today. Why is it shrinking?

It's harder to make a decision today because everything is changing. Things are just changing faster than in recent memory. And when I say recent, I'm sort of talking about my lifetime, right? I mean, we've been through dot-com boom, we've been through the, the rise of social, the rise of mobile first. I don't think anything has been changing this quickly and this seismically, right? So the internet was the last thing that really created such upheaval in, in business models, et cetera. But it took much longer. You look at the, the pace of change and the rate of change sort of as two axes. There's nothing in my lifetime that's moved this quickly. So when I'm trying to make a decision, the decision I make today could be wrong in 6 months, 1 year, like in a career-limiting timeframe, right? People used to be able to make a decision. It would take 3 years, 5 years to implement something. It would take another 3, 5 years to figure out if that was working or not. By then we might have, you know, the world had changed enough that I could be part of making the next decision. It's just not like that anymore. And providers are changing what they do so quickly. So if, if I'm, for example, if I'm looking for an AI solution, every current vendor I already work with has one. Plus there's a whole bunch of other providers out there that are, are net new. What should I do? Should I use one of the, the ones I have and should that, is there a way to plug that into everything else? Should I get something else that plugs into all the things I have? And by the time I do the analysis and try to figure this out, everything's changed.

Yeah.

So, so you just end up in this, I see it even when I'm editing research from colleagues, it's sort of like we, we, it takes a few months for us to do research, right? Because we're going out, we're doing a whole slew of interviews, we're going out and getting data, whatever it might be that by the time you get all that back and start thinking and then you have a conversation, it's like, oh, it shifted again.

What's encouraging in the report is where you talk about creativity. Creativity and empathy as strategic assets. And what, what I'm taking away in, in the world where everything shifts is we need to be able to create creativity in a state of chaos. And, and, uh, usually the best ideas come when everything is chaotic.

Totally agree with that. And things that can be easily automated and the things that are, are fairly routine and whatever, shift those onto agents and free up time to be creative, to, to, to think, right? That's, There are things that humans can do that machines can't. And, you know, we've been, we've been doing as much of both as we can. And this is, we, our whole thing, and I didn't say this at the start actually, but our whole thing with GTM Singularity is there's sort of a foreboding undercurrent to the term, right? It sounds negative. And yet we are sort of saying we see this as a huge opportunity if you start to change. And we actually use the analogy of a star. So again, going to astrophysics and when, when, when a, when a star starts to run out of gas, which is really what star is, right? But when the core of the star starts to run out of the fuel, it has nothing to hold back gravity and it starts to collapse in on itself. And generally that's the singularity, right? The, the, the, these new and mounting pressures are causing the old rules and, and models to collapse. One of two things typically happens. It collapses into such infinite density that you end up in a black hole. Or it's supernovas, it explodes and it releases incredible energy along with new elements and stars. But if you can, if you can sort of use that analogy to say, if we do nothing, we are getting sucked into a black hole. If we change what we do and how we do it, we can harness that energy to change what we do and, you know, explode into the future.

That thing, it's a fantastic analogy and it reminds me of the the reinventive capacity that Salesforce has shown over the years. And, uh, and in the report you say that the AI-native firms will become the, uh, the stars, the new stars.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, they will become acquisition targets. So when you think about a company like Salesforce, will they be the next black hole or the next supernova?

I don't know because it's going to depend on what they do. And it's not just Salesforce, it's every company, right? If they do nothing, if they continue to paper over the cracks and ignore all those things that seemed obvious, the control and the, you know, and the augmented and the resilient and the collaborative. If you don't do this and you don't shift and you don't start to change what you do and how you do it, that's what's gonna lead to the black hole. So I don't know who's gonna make it and who isn't because I don't know who's gonna change and who isn't. But I would agree with you, they've done a really good job of reinventing over the years. There's plenty of companies who have, and you look at even the number of businesses that acquired SaaS businesses to, not because they wanted the revenue or that, yes, we'll take that, but it might have even been dilutive, but we need to change. We can't shift to being a SaaS company. We need to bring in, and it was, it was thinking of those terms. They're the sort of AI type companies we think may get bought is the companies that have figured out how to be AI first, you know, calibrated that with human, doing things in a different way. That's what's going to make it, you know, companies are going to potentially acquire those for that capability to help transform the company as opposed to just to bring in the capability.

So I want to go back to where we started with, with your meeting in person with all those smart Forrester analysts. Will live meetings ever go away?

If the feedback from the last 2 weeks that I've had is any indicator, Absolutely not. So we did Summit last week and we had our research leadership meeting in Cambridge this week. And as pleasant as this is for you and I, we're two boxes on a screen. Yeah, it's not the same as when we're sitting together and the energy that the, some of the conversations I had in the last few weeks, it's, we commented a couple of times like, there is no way we would have had this conversation if we were showing up to a Zoom meeting or Teams meeting because we're just not doing that, you know. And yes, there's a familiarity and regularity if you're talking to some people, but the energy in Phoenix last week at our conference was just palpable. I mean, it was electric at times. You could really feel it. And the same thing this week. It was just, it's just different. It's not the same. We meet all of those people who were in that room this week together. We meet every 2 weeks. It's never, ever, ever the same. The creativity, the collaboration, the sparks that go off, the side conversations are just as important where you show up for an for a meeting disappear. You may not talk to those people for another 2 weeks, whereas here it was like just talking and walking out to get lunch on our way to this. We're in different breakouts together. Uh, you end up having different conversations and, and learning more about us, each other as humans, and that type of thing. I, I, I don't think it's ever gone away.

So where can people find your report?

So it's on forester.com for clients. There's a blog, a couple of blogs. If you go to forester www.sales3.0.com/blogs that sort of pull out some of the essence of it. The report is behind a firewall, so that's on our website. So any clients can access that already, and then other folks can, like I say, sort of read the blogs that they've probably got as much from this story as they'll get from that, right? But at least there's something there if they want to share it around, that type of thing. Reach out on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, happy to connect with folks who want to learn more. At conferences, wherever, wherever we go, you find us, introduce yourselves. We're always happy to have these chats. And then if folks have perspectives, if people disagree, like we are always keen to do that. We don't claim to have all the answers, right? We, we're very privileged that we get to talk to really senior people at really big organizations. And part of our job is sort of trying to, to synthesize what we're hearing and analyze. And so we're always open to those conversations too of, hey, I'm not seeing this, I'm not buying that. This isn't true in my industry. 'Cause that causes us, we're constantly sort of thinking about, is this accurate for everybody? Are there flavors of this? Is it, is it still valid? You know, in the next couple years, is this still valid? At some point, if the singularity is a point in time, you know, we get to this, this sort of connected, augmented, resilient GTM approach, and it's like, okay, and that has to be stress tested. That has to be, that has to keep up with whatever else changes. So we're constantly sort of trying to question and kick the tires on on our ideas, are they still relevant? While also sort of saying, and here's how you can get to it. So we're sort of both trying to look ahead and help you get to where we think things are.

I have two trivia questions. Uh-oh. What should we know about Dave that's not on his LinkedIn profile?

My current LinkedIn profile, I think, has the CX Forum banner. When that's not there, I actually have a, picture of myself diving, scuba diving in Iceland where it's cold, 2 degrees Celsius in a lake. But it's actually, what's significant for me about it is that it's in a lake where if you follow, I'm holding the two walls either side of me, and if you follow both those walls down, it's actually the tectonic plate where North America and Eurasia meet. So there's two things in here. One, I'm a motte, right? So I was born in England, grew up in Ireland, now live in America. And so I sort of feel like having two hands in on two continents feels very, it's an apt shot of me. I'm sort of split between and sort of part of two different worlds. And then just from a personal point of view, like scuba diving is one of the things I love to do. I get under the water whenever I can. I'm starting to get involved. We lived in Florida for about 10 years where I did most of my diving, starting to do some up in the Northeast. I'm back living in New York where it's a different style of diving. It's dark and murky, but it's— there's a lot of history under there. So I'm looking to get in and see as much of that as I can. So I'm always learning. I'm on to the next thing. That's what I'm trying to do.

The final question is, Is Forrester an assumed name? What's the history of Forrester?

Our founder and CEO is George Colony.

Yeah.

His full name is George Forrester Colony.

Ah, got it.

Uh, it was his mother's maiden name, I believe. Um, so yeah, it's George Forrester Colony.

And a forester is somebody who creates, uh, trees that grow, and, uh, Forrester as a company, uh, helps leaders grow to the level of optimal functioning.

That's, that's what we hope. Yep. That's what, that's what we wake up every day to do. Yeah.

Thank you, Dave. That has been inspiring and enlightening. Uh, and, uh, can't wait for our next conversation.

Thank you.

Enjoy it.