Apr 16

An AI-Ready GTM Requires Radical Unity

Marketing, sales, and customer success functions are converging with the rapid adoption of AI-enabled digital customer engagement tools and presents both opportunities and challenges for a B2B tech business. This trend, driven by evolving customer expectations for personalized, proactive, and digital-first interactions, is redefining accountability and workflow and is consequently blurring lines and pushing boundaries. Many companies have struggled, (with varying degrees of success), to achieve a holistic approach to reimagining their GTM to get the growth everyone wants. However, the newest wave digital adoption is begging for radical unity whether companies are deliberate about it or not.

While this convergence offers benefits such as enhanced customer engagement, growth, profitability, and competitive advantage, it also requires dismissing old paradigms that worked in the past, in order to create a future-ready GTM model fit for the B2B technology buyer.

The modern customer journey, characterized by its non-linear nature as a complex system demand for seamless, digital experiences, and no longer aligns with traditional liner or waterfall models and methods. This is compounded by having much more granular performance analytics at every interaction, which can be overwhelming and often challenging to derive actionable insights, pitting teams against each other when trying to share a unified view of what’s going on in the customer base. Evolving responsibilities for driving new business and expanding existing accounts in a digital-first manner can cause confusion and overlap across marketing, sales, and customer success functions. This can create a lot of friction which are just symptoms that underscore the need to redefine functions to suit the demands of the AI-enabled era.

What is needed is radical GTM unity. Radical unity is a mindset and a set of practices that foster seamless collaboration, shared accountability, and unwavering commitment across all facets of the GTM, from marketing, sales, to customer success. It requires a deliberate effort to break down silos, drive accountability, foster collaboration, and create a performance-based culture.

A Radically Unified GTM for an AI Future:

Aligned Opportunity Commit Targets: Establishing clear and aligned opportunity commit targets is crucial for ensuring that all marketing and sales teams are working towards the same objectives across net new and expansion opportunities. This involves setting realistic and achievable revenue goals, defining target customer segments, and assigning specific responsibilities to each function, not just within the sales team.

Unified Customer Needs-Based Segmentation: Creating a unified customer segmentation model and mapping the customer journey provides a shared understanding of the target audience, product/market fit, and their interactions with the company. This enables marketing and sales teams to tailor their strategies and messaging to the specific needs and pain points of each customer segment, at the right time of the engagement.

Shared Customer Experience Metrics: Defining a set of shared customer experience metrics across the lifecycle allows marketing, sales, and customer success teams to measure and track progress towards common goals. By focusing on key indicators such as customer preference, conversion, satisfaction, retention, and advocacy, the entire team can work together to deliver exceptional experiences at every touchpoint. This experience ultimately will be what differentiates vendors assuming products are parity or perceived as parity.

Integrated Customer Experience Management: Implementing a unified customer experience management philosophy takes a lot of discipline and is hard to do. It requires a unified transformation strategy, holistic technology roadmaps, a reimagined data strategy and business process change management. This ensures a consistent and seamless experience across all channels, from initial engagement to ongoing support.

Benefits of Radical GTM Unity

Improved Communication and Collaboration:

Radical unity fosters open and transparent communication, breaking down silos and allowing teams to share ideas, insights, and best practices. This collaborative environment promotes innovation, agility, and a shared sense of purpose.

Frictionless Customer Experience:

By aligning efforts and focusing on a unified customer journey, businesses can deliver a seamless and consistent experience that exceeds customer expectations. This leads to increased satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Increased Efficiency and Productivity:

Eliminating redundancies, streamlining processes, and improving collaboration through radical unity can significantly boost team efficiency, productivity and job satisfaction. Teams can focus their efforts on high-value activities, reducing wasted time and resources.

Competitive Advantage:

Companies that embrace radical GTM unity gain a significant advantage. By aligning their teams and optimizing customer experiences, they can differentiate themselves from competitors and establish a strong competitive position. In addition, by reducing the cost to acquire and serve customers, they can reinvest into innovation instead of dealing with customer issues.

In the AI-enabled future, radical unity is no longer an option but a necessity for GTM teams to achieve fantastic results. By embracing radical unity, reimagining functions, and leveraging the latest technology effectively, businesses can unlock hidden value, drive growth, and gain a competitive advantage in today and outpace their competition into the future.