Core GTM tactics like outbound, events, and content marketing remain highly effective for AI companies. The failure isn't in the plays themselves, but in using outdated, generic playbooks. Success comes from applying these same plays with more intelligence, scale, and AI-driven personalization.
Related Insights
Buyers now use AI to arrive with a full research dossier on your product, pricing, and competitors. This changes the GTM role from persuading customers with clever messaging to enabling their decision-making. The new focus is helping buyers quickly experience your product's value on their own terms.
In the previous SaaS era, emulating giants like Salesforce was a common but flawed strategy for startups. In the new AI era, there is no playbook at all, forcing founders to rethink go-to-market strategies from first principles rather than copying incumbents.
GTM leaders no longer need to delegate strategy implementation. With tools like ChatGPT, their spoken words can become code, allowing them to rapidly prototype and test complex, data-driven prospecting campaigns themselves, directly connecting high-level strategy to on-the-ground execution.
AI's power is not in creating successful strategies from scratch, but in scaling your existing best practices. An AI agent cannot make a broken process work. First, identify what messaging and campaigns are effective, then use AI to execute them at a near-infinite scale, 24/7.
While consolidating tools seems efficient, using specialized, best-in-class AI agents for each GTM function (one for outbound, one for inbound) yields superior results. The depth and focus of specialized tools enable more powerful and nuanced use cases, justifying the management overhead of multiple systems.
SaaS playbooks for sales, marketing, and success were designed for annual product changes. AI-native products iterating every 30 days require a complete organizational rethink, as old go-to-market motions cannot keep pace with the product's rapid evolution.
The idea that GTM playbooks are broken is a dangerous myth. Veteran B2B leaders are successfully running top AI companies using the same fundamental plays (inbound, demos). The difference is adapting to new tools and overwhelming demand, not reinventing the core strategies that have always worked. The 2021 version is obsolete, but the fundamentals are not.
The go-to-market tool market is fragmented because sales tactics have a short shelf life, quickly rendering point solutions obsolete. The future belongs to integrated platforms that act as an "IDE" (Integrated Development Environment), allowing teams to rapidly experiment, iterate, and execute new GTM strategies.
AI is making buyer journeys non-linear and compressed. Instead of a linear funnel, GTM strategy must shift to a continuous, customer-centric "flywheel" model. Buyers conduct deep research upfront, making direct sales engagement optional for some and requiring an always-on, value-first approach.
AI isn't a silver bullet. Morgan Cole of Red Canary argues it amplifies the underlying health of your GTM motion. If your sales and marketing teams are misaligned, AI will only accelerate that dysfunction. Conversely, strong alignment becomes supercharged.
