We’ve all seen the shift happening.

The same boards and CEOs that encouraged growth at all costs a decade ago are now laser-focused on efficient growth.

GTM leaders across industries are being tasked to reduce waste and stop focusing on anything that doesn’t advance overall strategic objectives with predictable outcomes.

This environment can be tricky but can also inspire tremendous innovation.

After all, it’s the perfect time to inspect traditional processes and review our tech spend to see what changes could increase efficiency and stability.

Buyer needs are shifting

In a recent study, G2 found that the needs of technology buyers are shifting to be centered more around value, risk reduction, and experience.

According to G2, buyers care about:

1. Ease of implementation

2. ROI within 6 months

3. Scale with my team

4. User adoption

5. Support

6. Easy integration

7. Features

8. Price and security

   Download the Emerging GTM Tech Report

7 problems with current GTM technology

Our analysts have identified seven core issues with current GTM technology that emerging tech players are trying to correct. Here are the themes that bubble to the top:

1. Data integration, cleansing, and sharing is still tricky: Despite huge and ongoing advances, there are known and systemic problems with current GTM technologies and processes. It can still be really hard to turn data into actionable insights that GTM teams can use to be more effective.

2. Seeing the big picture is almost impossible: We still struggle to see the full picture of what is happening across GTM activities and teams in an integrated, holistic way.

3. We need details but we want speed: GTM teams still need to understand the minutiae of deals, customer cycles, customer behavior, and GTM program performance, but we also need to be able to see the information in aggregate, quickly, from multiple different perspectives. 

4. We have reduced tolerance for learning new systems with poor UI: We know what we want, and we know the system has that data. We have lost patience for complex processes. We expect the information we need to be present, accessible and easy to understand.  

5. We finally get the importance of NRR: We know we need to keep our customers, and we know we need to expand them.

6. Failure is less acceptable than it used to be: We know that our CEOs, CFOs, and boards have low tolerance for experimentation and failure when it comes to using critical business resources.  

7. We know we have to do more with less: Efficiency is everything.

We recently hosted a showcase of emerging GTM technology providers that are trying to solve many of these problems.

Watch the Emerging Tech Showcase

The 3 Waves of GTM Technology

Lots of things have experienced third waves: feminism, COVID, democracy, AI, cognitive behavioral therapy, and more.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the third wave of GTM technology (because of course we have!)

The First Wave

Tech like CRM, Marketing Automation, CMS, and ERP helped GTM leaders embrace the first wave:

1. Get core business functions online

2. Automate sales

3. Automate marketing

4. Collect and organize first-party data

The Second Wave

The second wave saw HR tech, sales engagement, customer success, sales enablement, ABM, productivity, and Ops innovations giving GTM teams the following ability to:

1. Hone in on department-specific use cases

2. Follow a repeatable process

3. Manage and scale functional teams

4. Use first- and third-party data

The Third Wave

The third wave of GTM technology involves emerging technology related to and enabling RevOps, sales intelligence, AI assistants, conversation intelligence, and more. These tools enable:

1. The cross-functional unification of Go-to-Market teams

2. Revenue efficiency

3. Single source of truth

4. Customer obsession and a focus on NRR

It’s also exciting to see technology vendors that came of age during the first and second waves embracing third-wave concepts in their latest product releases and offerings.

Emerging technology companies to watch

We released a report on emerging GTM tech and recently hosted an emerging GTM tech showcase to highlight companies that are embracing the third wave.

The companies we researched all centered on three key themes: 

1. Improving overall revenue efficiency

2. Improving NRR

3. Driving more pipeline and increasing sales velocity 

Read the report

The tools we highlighted focused on a few key GTM activities including: 

1. Better understanding and team-wide adoption of using an Ideal Customer Profile to focus marketing, sales, and CS efforts. 

2. Scaling content and driving more brand awareness

3. Understanding and driving customer value to improve retention and expansion

4. Collecting information quickly using AI

5. Presenting actionable analysis and next steps using AI

6. Sales and CS Coaching using AI

Each and every one of the third-wave technologies is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, and ease of activity execution.

Read the Emerging Tech Report

Here are some examples.

Tech that improves revenue efficiency

• Attention: an AI-powered sales assistant helping teams overcome inefficiencies at every stage of the sales cycle

• BigLittle.ai: a revenue leak mitigation platform

• Falkon: a go-to-market intelligence platform that helps teams win more deals through actionable insights and automation that drives operational excellence

• Fullcast: a RevOps platform for GTM planning and execution

• Ignition: the first system of record for Go-to-Market

• OpenGTM: a SaaS company providing AI-powered revenue intelligence to find, refine, monitor, and apply a company's Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

• Xply: a revenue planning platform for sales and marketing

Tech that improves NRR

• Foresight: a platform for customer-led growth infrastructure

Tech that drive pipeline and/or increase sales velocity

• Demandwell: an SEO growth platform for B2B SaaS

• Inflection: a B2B marketing automation platform purpose-built for product-led growth

• Factors.ai: a business-to-business (B2B) analytics software firm

• The Juice: a B2B content discovery platform

• MarketMuse: an AI content planning and optimization software

• Lavender: provider of the leading AI-powered sales email coaching platform

Most GTM teams are under a significant amount of pressure today to produce more revenue, do it quickly, and do it as inexpensively as possible.  

Whether you are in the market today for a solution to help you, or you simply want to be informed about what other people are struggling with and investing in technology to solve, these two sessions of the Emerging Technology Showcase might be able to shed some light on things.

Watch the Emerging Tech Showcase

We had a great time in Los Angeles last week for our roadshow. If you missed out, we did our Thursday night happy hour at . . . THE MAGIC CASTLE!

It’s going to be hard to top that, but Karthi always finds a fun activity for us to do the night before the roadshow. Join us in San Francisco in December!

Happy November!

Love,

The GTM Partners’ Team