5 Mega Trends That Are Defining The Future Of Go-To-Market

All right, I'm here to share some really new research that we have been doing from a go to market perspective. So let me ask you straight up. How many of you have a go to Market role in your organization? I have no idea. The people who are not raising their hand. What do you do for a living? I mean, if go to market is not a role, a job description, somewhere in your job, I don't know what you do. So on my flight over here, I was watching Mark Cuban's documentary and he was talking about like, well, how do you look at businesses? And he said three things that was really fun. He said, look, if you're selling, if you have margins and if you have profits, that's pretty much it, what every single business need to think about. And to me, he defined business as a process. So when Brian and I wrote the book Move three years ago, that was our big idea. I'll tell you an interview that we had with Brian halligan, the then CEO of HubSpot. And I said, brian, who owns Go to Market? And he says, the CEO, I'm like, that can't be true. Everybody owns like go to Market. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. Here are the three things every single CEO owns. I'm like, what are those? You want to know what those are? Alright, so number one, he said, well, the number one job of the CEO is to make sure that they know what the vision is. And they're articulating that every single day to their team members, to their partners, to their friends, to their market, to the shareholders every single day. There cannot be more advocacy than the vision for the company. That's number one job of the CEO. Number two, you gotta own culture. If you cannot hire the right people, no matter how great of a product you have, it's not gonna drive very much. But here's the thing he said that he said he gets no credit for. And remember Brian Halligan at that time, he was a CEO from when the company was $0 all the way to be a publicly traded company. So he was a CEO through and through. And he said, here's the third thing. And I'll never forget he looked dead in my eyes and said, I own Go to Market. And I'm like, wait a minute, how? Give me some examples. He said, well, who is going to make the decision if you need to stay in North America or go to emea? That's a Go to Market decision. Who's going to make a decision if I should spend more money in marketing or sales? That's a go to market decision. Who's going to make a decision between if you acquire a company or partner with another company or build a product? That's a go to market decision. So for the first time, the reason I'm sharing this story with all of you is because until that point, because I ran marketing at Pardot before, worked at Salesforce, launched a company called Terminus, got acquired by P From. I thought I knew Go to Market. That moment was when I became a student of Go to market. So what I'm here to share with you is as a student of the discipline of go to market, what are some of the big trends that I'm seeing? Because I started studying it since the last three years, all the different things. So the book literally launched me into being just a student of go to market. And if there's one thing I can give you today and if there's one thing that you can remember, is that become the student of the role of go to market. So let me ask you again. Raise your hand if you are or if you have a go to market role in your organization. All right. I expected to see every single one of you because that is where everything goes. So let me share some doom and gloom right off the bat. All of these stats in our latest research and we're going to have the QR code. So as soon as the research comes out on October 22, you will get it. But I'm doing a preview of it. Every single stat that you're seeing right now, not enough pipeline, Longer sales cycles, decline in the win rates, decline in the deal values, missed quota, companies missing revenue. How many of you are facing that right now? Most companies we do advisory work with, almost every company has at least two to four of it. None of these numbers are great. It's terrible. At the same time, there's something new happening in the marketplace, which is what I want to bring your attention to. But that's the state of B2B right now when it comes to go to market. And remember, as Brian said, go to market is a transformational process. It's an iterative changing thing. So if the things that were working before are not working now, you got to change the process between that's the focus area. The other thing is a lot of people have talking. I saw an article literally last week, so I dropped it in here. Is Go to Market strategy, the new abm? Well, let me ask you, how many of you have been doing abm? All right. Is that the same as Go to Market? Is it I mean, that's literally Forbes and Forrester writing about it. Well, let me share with you a chart that is really interesting. This is the only reason I use Google now, Google Trends. If you don't use it, use it. It's kind of really funny. And I wrote some books that were at the timing. The timing was really interesting. So I don't take credit for the hype cycles in it, but I do think that's really interesting that as ABM went down in terms of Google Trends, GTM went up. And what's interesting is when we were talking about ABM for the last 10 years, it was about sales and marketing coming together. Like, if I have to walk in another meeting that talks about sales and marketing alignment, I'm going to lose it. We do not need sales and marketing alignment. You know, the reason we have that issue still is because we're talking about functional roles. And what's beautiful about go to market, it's a company initiative, which is why everybody needs to be thinking about go to market. So imagine tomorrow when you go back and have a meeting and instead of a pipeline meeting where the salesperson starts twitching a little bit when you talk about pipeline. Or if you go into a meeting and say, we're going to look at marketing leads where the marketing person starts drinking coffee immediately. We don't need to put people in boxes. We need to say, how is our go to market working? And the trend is showing that go to market is absolutely the number one reason companies have to reinvent and reimagine. And all of you, all of us in the room are responsible figuring that out. Now here's a quick poll. Raise of hand, one finger, two finger, three fingers. How many of you think the one thing that's keeping you from hitting your business goals is internal clarity? If that's one, then just give me one finger. If you are market conditions, say two. And if it is competitive landscape, say three. So let me see some hands. Three. One, two. Lots of threes. Lots of twos. Lots of one. Well, our research shows that 68% of B2B go to market leaders are saying the number one reason it's stopping them from hitting the goals is actually internal go to market clarity. In short, your competition is you. How many of you would say that? If I can get my entire executive team to agree on a specific agenda, a specific ICP going after a specific segment will actually hit our numbers. How many of you think that's true? And Then that is 68% of the go to market leaders are saying that. So I want you to again, this whole session is about the trends, but it's also about going back to basics. If you can get alignment at that level, it can change the way you go to market. As part of the latest research, we actually have been doing this study for three years. Almost every month, every other month we'll ask what are the top go to market problems? And and we identified 15 go to market problems. So there's a good news and bad news. There are only 15 go to market problems, folks. The bad news is you gotta figure it out. And the top three are highlighted at the top. It is about out of sync, where the teams are not working. It is about sales, heroic sales being the reason where you're not able to repeat certain processes. Or it is the team feeling that they're always reactive, they're not proactive enough to drive the business. Those are the top three go to market challenges that we see in organizations. And if that's not enough, here's what's interesting about all of it. And you've been hearing today, all of it and even the partner day I heard about this, which is what are companies, what are buyers really trying to buy? You remember the time when in 2015, 2016, people were looking for and you and I were looking for best of breed solutions. I want the best solution that does one thing and that's okay. Right now, 82% of the buyers are saying I don't want best of breed. I want something that integrates. I want something that shows the integration as quickly as possible so that I don't have to go in 10 different tools to figure out what the answer is. So the pendulum has shifted. But what's even more interesting is we researched and said, well, how many actually go to market leaders are doing this? We found that only 30%. Only 30% of go to market leaders are actually using integrated tech stack. And when they use something like revenue operations to figure out what's working, what's not, they're able to see better value. And the whole point of revenue operations for those companies is to see an overall go to market value of all the different technologies. And that's not where it stops. Here's another data point that's been really interesting. In 2023 we saw, we did a study with G2 and we found out that 47% of the buyers, that is you is saying that well, when I buy something I'm going to see ROI in six months. That's 2023. This is as of last month in 20, 24, 57% of the buyers. Anybody wants to guess how quickly they want to see an ROI, just shout out a number. How much? 60 days. Anybody else? 30 days. Here it is in three months, max, 90 days. And I would think in some of you, I think they were probably very happy when they were doing it. Because if it's true, to be told, it's probably 30 days. It's probably the first onboarding call. It's probably the first milestone when you say, ah, man, I thought they did this, but it's not, not working out for it. And they've already made that decision. And on top of that, if that's not enough, it's shrinking. How many go to market tech you will see in a couple of more slides I will share. How many more go to market tech do you need to run your go to market? Is more technology solving anything for us? Probably not. But we have to figure out what works to drive go to market. So here is the first big takeaway for you. If you are in a 2025 planning season right now, I want to give you the eight most important questions that you need to answer in order to build your 2025 plan. I was talking to some people over here. They're trying to build their own company, they're starting a new company, they're at a different place and they have multiple different products in their organization. No matter where you are, these are the eight questions we hear over and over and over that every company needs to answer. And the reason is once you are able to answer these questions for a product or for a segment, you can actually have major go to market decisions happen in your company. I'll give you an example as we go through it. But let's just say you are how many of you are a SMB company? All right, so how many of you are in mid market, say, okay, enterprise. All right, so regardless of where you are, let's say you're a small SMB company, you're trying to figure out where do you grow the most? Well, that's where you need to figure out, is it a single. If it's a single product, which ICP I need to focus on. But if you are a big company, like an enterprise, and if you have multiple different products like some of our customers do now, you may have to go through this for every single product because the ICP may be different, but the segment might be different. So when we work with customers, we see that these eight questions literally allow you to figure out where to focus the next Dollar. All right, let's come into the five mega trends. This is what our research shows. So I'm gonna walk through each one of them really quickly. Each one of them, none of them, I would say are, oh my gosh, I didn't think that. But the data is so good that I'm like, whoa, this is gonna change the way you're gonna go to market. Let me also give you another data point. There was a time where companies were able to drive revenue. Let's say you wanna build a $10 million business, you could raise 40, $50 million and get to it. Today, if you wanna build a $10 million business, chances are you have to do that. And if you're raising money, you have to do that with 15, 20 million. What does that tell you? That you have to figure out a different go to market motion. Because adding more bodies, adding more salespeople, adding more marketing tools is just not doing it. So what is it that's gonna drive? So let's go through one by one. You probably have heard this before. AI will not take your job, but people who do AI well will take your job. I'll give you a perfect example of that. Anybody been following Adam Robinson? Right. So when you see, I was talking to Adam about this thing, I asked him, okay, well, let's see. In last six months, they were able to generate 2.6 million in ARR. Alright, they had a heavy churn about 14%. And he was going through all the metrics. I asked him, how many people do you have in your company to get to $2.6 million? He said 6. There wasn't a company created in the past, before last few years where you can have six people actually driving 2.6 million. It was unheard of. It's impossible. Right now. There are companies who are actually doing it. There are multiple companies at 10 million in revenue with four to six people. What does that mean for you? I'm going to get to that part. It's not about job loss. It's about how do you create the right kind of discipline. And there are companies that are betting on creating a hundred million dollar business with about 50, 50 to 60 people. How do you do that? It's not about, oh my gosh, my job is going. It's actually saying, how do I get that job where I make a lot of money, have a lot of equity in the business and drive my business forward? I think that's a real opportunity for everyone sitting in this room. I'll give you another data point on here. 60% of the companies are using some sort of AI in their product. We all know that it's probably almost more than 80%. But here is the kicker. Every single buyer is asking what can you do for me that I don't have to do? Meaning I have too much on my plate. I don't want to do everything. What can your product do for me, what kind of service you can add to me? So that's why they're adding more AI elements so that that product would do a lot more for it. Where the consumer you is not sitting and doing all the work in their software somebody else is doing for them. And here is a big one that most people don't think about. How many of you track NRR in your company net revenue retention? Did you know that if you have 120% NRR and this is what's changing the game for every single company when you think about outcomes, if you have 120% NRR, you don't even have to have one new customer, but you can still double your revenue every five years. Let me say that again. Without a single new customer, which means you have zero acquisition cost. You can double your revenue every five years if you're able to do 120% NRR, which means your go to market has to be entirely different than whatever discipline we all have grown up in. Sometimes you feel like there is only one way to do this thing and what data is showing companies getting built is a completely different way. And right now it's cutthroat. Right now everybody's feeling those numbers of slip pipeline and revenue numbers missing. And right now we have to figure out are we going to go in the same direction to get revenue or is there a better way to drive revenue in your organization that will change the game as you think about it. Here's the second one. Our data suggests that your 90% of all the different go to market playbooks that we have are going to cease to exist. Let me give you an example. SEO. How many of you focus on SEO as a sole way of driving business? We all do. I don't remember the last time going to Google in the last three months. It's changing pay per click. That business has obviously changed quite a bit. It still works. But is it going to work forever? I don't know. It's changing quite fast. You think about big, big, massive events that we are in. We're also seeing smaller breakfast events happening all over the place. That's driving more revenue. So every single playbook that we Know that has been working for so much is actually not working. Here's some data for you. Average ARR growth rate continues to decline. Well, what does that mean? It's actually what's changing is the companies who have better sales and marketing efficiency is growing much faster. That just means that whatever we knew about go to market, how we are going to spend on marketing, how we are going to spend on sales, how are we going to spend on customer success is all changing. And all of the data is showing just one thing. Is it efficient, is it profitable, is it small enough where you can double down? That's a very different playbook than 10 years ago that most of us had to run. And even the tools that are coming out there, these are all the tools that we've been looking at in house and out of house. All of these are dirt cheap when you start actually testing it. So there is no excuse for us to figure out how I can do my job better. The problem is are we going to use these technologies and keep it integrated and actually drive and test different outcomes? Here's another one for you. This is a big one because I think most of us actually crave for this to be not true, but it's actually true. Now Salesforce just announced their results and they said that their growth rate is 8% but that doesn't sound that bad. But it is actually bad. When you think about it was 22% or 20% or 15 years for last two decades they didn't really have anything lower than that. But even Salesforce, their growth is 8% even they are changing the go to market motions and the ways they're doing. So the question for all of us over here is simply this. Are these frameworks working for you? Is this idea of driving as many leads as possible at the top and turning to customers or purely running ads on certain campaigns or essentially figuring out how to be hiding multiple SDRs and AES to drive. Are these playbooks working for you? Am I hunches and the data says no. So the question is well what is the framework you're going to use especially for the rest of the year when you have a specific goal to hit your revenue numbers, what frameworks you're going to use at that point. So let me just share the go to market operating system at a really rapid phase and tomorrow I'm doing a deep dive to go a lot more detail on it. But every single element that you see on this, the difference between the two is at growth at all cost. You're looking at tam, which means I'm gonna go after as many people as possible. The new efficient growth model is TRM, which is total relevant market. You might need 20 customers, maybe 50 customers by the end of the year to hit your number. But if you're going after a thousand leads or accounts, you're missing the whole point. You're missing the whole point. And that may be the reason why you're not hitting the numbers that you are when you're thinking about we already talked about integrations in roi. Let me just talk about go to Marketplace. If all we are doing is having marketing come up or sales run certain place and it's not coordinated between all the go to market leaders, it's the number one reason why companies are not hitting their numbers. And finally go to market dashboards, you will see on the slides later on and when you download it that we have dashboards that we see companies need to start implementing that are not marketing dashboard, that are not sales dashboard. They're actually across the board business dashboards that drive business on number four, an integrations and ROI will decide the winners. Here's another incredible slide that shows how many go to market tech stack is required for companies to run. Guess what? There are about 23 go to market tech. And remember I am saying go to market tech which is very different than all the tech in the world. You may have a lot more technologies but what are the key tools companies are using to run their go to market? And some of those logos are there. We have done about 100 tech stack review of companies from small to mid size to enterprise and we see about 23 technologies. The challenge is only 30% of them is integrated. And if only 30% is integrated then you're not able to see the results. So you should demand from all of your tech, how are all these things going to get integrated? And here's the last one. This is for especially for every one of you over here, strategist meet specialist. Every single one of you have to find a way to become the strategist, not the specialist. So if any one of you are here and saying I am the best at this, I'm going to tell you up front that's the problem. Because at some point something has come up that is gonna do better than that. You have to become a strategist. I'll give you an example of a company that actually had a whole bunch of content writers and they were saying well now we can change all the content writers to all these AI and obviously they did not perform as well. But the person who actually kept the job, actually got the bonus and made equity in the company was the person who said, I know how to use all these things to drive great conversions for our organization and create the content very much tailored to it. That person is the strategist. So as you were talking about it, we look at it as 3P's problem market fit, product market fit, and platform market fit. As an organization, every single product that you have is part of one of these three. And either you are in a problem market fit, but you know what? You could be a 10, $20 million company still in the problem market fit because you're trying to figure out what's the repeatable process in. And we see a lot of that happen. And if you're in a product market fit, that means you have something repeatable, but more importantly, can it scale? And the reason it's squiggly is because we have never seen a single company who's all up and to the right. They all have dips and valleys that goes through it. The question is, how are you going to solve it? Let me share with you some of the valleys that we see, and tell me which of the valley that you are in. We see companies saying they have created a great product, but they couldn't mark they're not able to market. How many of you are in that valley? I see you. If you can market but can't sell, that's when you have a sales marketing challenge. You have a great brand, but you're not converting enough. Or you can sell but can deliver where the salesperson sold something. Pie in the sky. And the product team is saying, I don't know what you just sold, or you can deliver but can't renew. Where your customer said, I love you, but you know what's coming after that. Or you can renew, but you can expand. Goes back to that nrr net revenue retention. How do you grow that? And because ROI is at the forefront of it, and because teams are getting smaller and because it's a lower budget, here's where we are. We're at the crux of insanity. Everybody knows that if you do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, that definition of insanity. So the question is, what are you gonna do? So let me close it with this. There are gonna be two kinds of people walking out of this room today. Number one, who say, you know what I know, I know how to do go to market for my business, which means I'm a specialist. I know how to run events. I know how to write content, I, I know how to do demand. I know how to do design, whatever that might be. And there's another kind of person, I wonder who that is, who would say, I want to understand the business of go to market, which means I don't have an agenda. I actually come in to solve my go to market problems. I look at those 15 go to market problems and say where can we fix that? I look at those eight questions for the go to market operating system and I say I want to fix it, I want to figure out how to do it. The whole thing depends on figuring out can you go from growth at all cost to efficient growth at scale. So in summary, I'm going to leave you with this and you can download it. There are lots of amazing logos that you see that go through the go to market OS and certification through it. These five things are not crazy. Something that you can do. Don't be afraid of AI. Embrace it, use it. I heard Jeremy talk about before, it is great, but the old playbooks are dying. You have to change that. You have to test new. If Software is growing, SaaS business is growing, that's great. But services is even more important and you need roi. And finally the best people are going to be the strategists of their companies. Thank you so much. See you tomorrow.