We’re just at the start of the AI-enabled growth revolution, and your company may already be falling behind if you’re not rethinking your whole approach to GTM. AI is now or will soon be capable of resolving a number of longstanding barriers to growth, including software integrations, marketing experimentation, sales process automation, partnership development, customer success, and strategy development. As a result, we’re starting to see a fundamental change in the practice of marketing execution and strategy.
GTM leaders who ace AI-powered execution soonest will be the first to leverage what they learn for AI-guided GTM strategy. At that point, their performance will accelerate away from their behind-the-curve competitors. Here’s what to think about now in order to stay ahead of the game.
Powerful data synthesis for insights that fuel growth
GTM teams have always had more data than they can use effectively because until now, they lacked the tools to synthesize data in real time at scale. What makes AI uniquely valuable for GTM is AI’s ability to quickly extract actionable insights and meaning from large amounts of data. That allows GTM teams to make better—not perfect, but better—decisions faster, and to iterate and refine those choices faster and more effectively as well.
For example, AI can generate insights around user behavior, intent, trends, and other data to deliver clearer and more granular ICPs. Along similar lines, AI insights can identify areas where PMF needs improvement, and it can support the creation of custom integrations to help SaaS companies achieve several of the hallmarks of optimal PMF faster and more consistently than they would without AI.
Accelerated experimentation capabilities
Already, 63% of marketers use AI every week, according to a recent ZoomInfo GTM survey. Within marketing, there are plenty of AI use cases. Having AI generate your content can make that process more efficient. Having AI orchestrate review, approval, publishing and distribution of that content can deliver efficiency at a different order of magnitude.
Marketing teams can also use AI to automate tasks like list building, prospect research, and email outreach, so companies can get the right message to the right people faster. The ZoomInfo survey found that AI is “saving GTM professionals an average of 12 hours per week.”
The real AI ROI here, though, is the ability to experiment faster. GTM teams can use some of their saved time to identify new areas for experimentation and put AI to work on them. For example, AI can run multiple A/B tests simultaneously to quickly iterate and optimize messaging for different customer segments — and it can do so far faster than the humans on the GTM team.
Sales enablement optimization
AI will help organizations tackle one of the biggest hurdles to winning deals, the B2B software integration paradox. Salespeople can’t close SaaS deals without customer integrations, but without a deal, it can be hard for engineers to justify building an integration. By allowing business teams to generate custom integrations as needed for each deal, AI can finally break through the paradox that’s been a growth hurdle for software companies since the dawn of the industry. The availability of integrations can also shorten sales cycles, allow team members to hit their quotas more often, and accelerate revenue recognition.
Driving growth through partnerships
Partnerships are where the real growth happens in SaaS, with mature startups earning up to 40% of their revenue through channel partnerships and growing that revenue nearly twice as fast as less mature competitors. The availability and quality of integrations is a limiting factor for many early stage startups. Without readily available customer integrations, these companies aren’t appealing as partners.
Using AI to generate custom integrations at speed, these companies can expand their addressable market by anywhere from 20% to 50% through partnerships and enterprise deals that would have been out of reach before AI. This kind of integration-on-demand capability can also allow companies to launch partnership programs faster, reactivate partnerships that were languishing due to integration delays, and level the channel partner playing field against more mature competitors.
Cultivating customer success
As customer success takes an earlier role in the buyer lifecycle, it also stands to benefit from AI. Integrations are a key factor here because customers can’t activate without integrating the products they already use. But AI can also improve and continuously adapt processes like product onboarding, ongoing user training, and customer support to reduce friction and drive success. These AI applications give the customer success team more time to focus on more complex customer needs, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Understanding the real value of AI in GTM
All of these use cases can generate data that helps GTM leaders optimize strategy and eventually use AI to develop novel approaches. This is where AI is ultimately headed, although right now it can only execute what it’s seen before. When AI is capable of drawing data and inspiration from seemingly unrelated industries, categories, and use cases, that’s when we’ll see fully creative AI.
All the automation and execution use cases discussed above are steps along the path to that point. Following them now generates value along the way. It’s also the only practical way to be ready when AI can effectively handle strategy development and other creative functions.
The AI future of GTM is coming. Organizations that embrace the possibilities and start experimenting with and learning from AI execution now will be ready when that future arrives. Everyone else will be playing catch-up from very far behind.
