Go‑to‑market strategy and execution is rapidly evolving — driven by a combination of customer drivers, technology innovation and changing organizational strategy. 2023 was a pivotal year, and ANNUITAS expects much to change in 2024.
Here are the top three ‘predictions’ for how the go‑to‑market discipline will transform in 2024:
#1 – Random Acts of Marketing and Sales Acquisition Will Hit a Breaking Point; Orchestrated, Customer Journey-centered Go‑to‑market Will Finally Become the Standard in B2B; Customer Success (and Post-sale) Will Become a Key Part of the Equation
The majority of B2B companies engage in random acts of marketing and sales every day. This may never change. But whether we are talking about well-thought-out ‘growth marketing’ programs or haphazard “inside-out,” interruptive go‑to‑market tactics, random acts of marketing and sales are at a breaking point.
The key drivers of this breaking point are performance issues and budget issues:
- Performance issues: Conversion rates in paid digital media and content syndication have been trending down for some time, and outbound email is at some of its worst performance levels. Wordstream’s annual Google Ads benchmarks study for 2023 reported that average paid search conversion rates went down 10% and cost per lead increased 20%, year-over-year. This is a similar trend reported in the 2022 report, as well.The implications are two-fold: #1 – Digital interruptive channel execution must be truly flawless (to be worth the spend) and must be balanced against organic channels (meaning it can’t be over-indexed). #2 – This also speaks to the need to get more serious about offline engagement channels — perhaps leading to a unique “arbitrage moment” for field marketing in 2024.
- Budget issues: Amid uncertainty, driven by the Fed’s rate hikes, CFOs began slashing marketing and sales budgets in late Q3 of 2022. This has made for a challenging 2023. “Seventy-one percent of CMOs said they lack the budget to fully execute their strategy in 2023,” reports Gartner in a survey of more than 400 CMOs and marketing leaders.
This combination of factors leaves little room for mistakes. Our ability to succeed through haphazard marketing and sales acquisition efforts is rapidly coming to an end. Random acts are costly and fail to drive real, sustainable lift to sales and revenue. In fact in many cases, these random acts of marketing barely cover existing customer churn and leave companies with a flat business, eroding growth.
ANNUITAS believes this breaking point will come in 2024 — driving a new standard for the nature and quality of go‑to‑market programs. This new, ‘strategic’ standard will be defined by three factors:
- Customer journey basis for go‑to‑market design
- Orchestration of multiple customer touchpoints
- CLV lift as the objective for go‑to‑market program outcomes
The other impact – already underway within many organizations — is their becoming more sophisticated in their post-sale — and in viewing their customer journey and go‑to‑market as being inclusive of both pre- and post-sale. Shifting away from random acts of acquisition and focusing on CLV lift sheds light on the importance of driving a fully integrated growth effort with customers, as much as with prospects.
Ultimately the evolution away from random acts is one towards balance and sustainability in go‑to‑market.
#2 – AI-enabled Go‑to‑market Tactics Will Fail to Drive Lift; a Perpetual Growth Engine Framework Will Be Necessary for AI to Thrive
Many B2B organizations are increasingly turning to AI to solve the ‘ills’ of diminishing returns in their go‑to‑market. Ninety-four percent of marketers are using AI tools as part of their GTM Tech Stack, according to Deloitte’s bi-annual CMO survey. The top use cases, not surprisingly, are content creation and personalization for GTM activities.
Their approach? GTM leaders are experimenting by chasing ‘low hanging fruit’ in their deployments, which is the approach largely being taken by technology vendors, as well. The result is automated content development, automated emails, automated chat prompts, automated lead identification, automated segmentation … you get the point.
The problem with this is two-fold: First, we are largely just automating more random acts. Second, we are simply increasing the volume of go‑to‑market touchpoints that are now attacking our prospects and customers.
AI is rapidly becoming a go‑to‑market tsunami, which will eventually drown our customers.
How will this change in 2024? We see three marketplace shifts that will help course-correct AI in go‑to‑market:
- The emergence of ‘strategic guardrails’ to guide AI in go‑to‑market
AI isn’t automatic. You can’t just deploy AI within a use case and expect it to ‘figure it out’ — especially if there’s any concern about the integrity of the underlying data being used or critical dependencies on the activity to which AI is being applied.Meghan Keaney Anderson, Head of Marketing at AI firm Jasper, said it best, “The Biggest Thing Missing from AI? Strategy.”AI in go‑to‑market will be most successful when it is surrounded by a strategic framework — a GTM operating system — to contextualize AI’s role in your go-to-market and to provide structure and integrity to the underlying GTM data. ANNUITAS Conversation Track Architecture™ and ANNUITAS Demand Process™ are critical foundations for strategic go‑to‑market and thus for ‘strategic AI in go-to-market’ in 2024.Without these guardrails, you’re not really improving your go-to-market — you’re just shifting where you are spending your time and resources as an organization – and you are not really taking full advantage of the potential for AI.
- A Perpetual Growth Engine mindset takes hold
So, how can we approach marrying AI and go‑to‑market in a more strategic way? The key is to transcend the ‘tactical’ use cases — the opportunities with strong potential for us to get caught up in random acts with short-term productivity gains (or with the potential to take us down a ‘rabbit hole’) — and instead focus on how AI can change our go-to-market game in a repeatable and sustainable way.
The team at Prophet argues that AI will drive us from the “Digital Marketing Era” to the “Growth Engine Marketing Era.” They believe AI is driving a third, distinct marketing shift within the past fifty years, one where “[p]ersonalization based on data is mainstream, no longer ‘innovative,’” and where “[p]redictive analytics, powered by machine learning, fuels growth strategy, positioning CMOs at the intersection of business, technology and operations.”A Perpetual Growth Engine is a holistic approach to go‑to‑market that operationalizes go-to-market around customer journey; that orchestrates touchpoints ‘right place, right time’ based on journey mapping and a customer’s telemetry against this mapping; that leverages an underlying, converged GTM Technology Stack to power the engine by tracking customer telemetry, driving customer orchestration, and ensuring customer continuity; and that continuously optimizes this motion against lift to sales and overall customer lifetime value.And a Perpetual Growth Engine does not merely operate in the digital domain. It should orchestrate interactions online … and offline. Gartner notes that GTM teams need to better provide higher value content across multiple channels to better educate and guide buyers across digital AND human-assisted journeys.The game-changing opportunity is not for tactical improvements but rather for AI to truly power — and optimize — a company’s Perpetual Growth Engine. - Marketing automation and AI collide
This is inevitable. The platform today if you want to orchestrate touchpoints and drive perpetual engagement? Marketing automation. The challenge is that marketing automation is simply that … automation. That means what you put into it is what you get out of it. You write a script, and it automates it.The go‑to‑market program of the future will require intelligence that can both interpolate and extrapolate steps to optimize the go-to-market mix of content and channels by journey stage. It will need to be structured, but it also will need to be able to not have to be so scripted.AI will be the decision engine of the GTM Technology Stack of the future — which puts AI on a collision course with marketing automation as organizations re-think how their Perpetual Growth Engine is powered.
#3 – B2B CMOs Will Seize the Moment — Assuming a Key Role in the Converged Growth GTM Organization and Making a Play for the Chief Growth Officer Role
Is the B2B CMO’s role past it’s prime?
There is no doubt that B2B CMOs face numerous challenges — some of their own making, and some where CEOs and CFOs are to blame.
The B2B CMO’s top challenges today include:
- CMOs (too often) define their remit in terms of ‘owning’ all marketing function
- Marketing is not at the center of growth strategy
- CMOs are not a trusted digital transformation leader
- Marketing is viewed as a cost center
- Marketing is starved for funding
B2B CMOs — whose tenures are often shorter than their other colleagues in the C-suite — are mired in a never-ending mismatch between organizational expectations and the CMO’s sman of control, capabilities and resultant delivery. It may be that the B2B CMO role is past its prime; regardless, CMOs are tired of being set up to fail.
What is changing amid this environment? Many B2B CMOs are seizing the moment to reposition their skill set going into 2024. ANNUITAS believes key areas where this will occur include:
- Placing marketing at the center of growth within their organization
The core of a Converged Growth approach to go‑to‑market is the customer journey — and operationalizing go-to-market around this journey. No go-to-market stakeholder is perhaps better positioned to drive fundamental strategy and execution in this approach than the CMO.CMOs bring customer journey insights and persona/ICP planning to the table; CMOs possess the personnel, content and infrastructure that can orchestrate multi-touch customer engagement, online and offline; and CMOs are already deep in the weeds of capturing and reporting on content, channel, and campaign performance. They just need to bring all of this to a more integrated, commercially-aware, end-to-end state – and think strategically, not tactically.“CEOs who place marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to have greater than 5 percent annual growth compared with their peers,” according to McKinsey. - Being the steward of Demand Experience
Many CMOs have attempted to position themselves as the ‘owner’ of Customer Experience (CX) within their organizations. Frankly, this is the wrong positioning for CMOs, and many organizations are changing course on this. One example is UPS, whose CMO and Customer Experience Officer is leaving at the end of this year. UPS is eliminating the CMO role. “Responsibility for the Atlanta-based company’s marketing will be assumed by Matt Guffey, who is being promoted from the role of president of UPS global strategy and transformation to chief commercial and strategy officer,” according to the Wall Street Journal.CMOs need to re-position — not attempting to own CX, but instead being the steward of Demand Experience (DX). DX, which often is not well understood, measures the GTM experience of prospects and customers. It defines their customer journey through the lens of the information requests, the stakeholder and engagement channel interactions and the buying phases.DX is the sum of ALL of the points of interaction between a company’s marketing, sales and customer success organizations and the resultant impact on initial sale and longer-term growth of a customer’s account. It defines the critical path of a customer’s commercial lifecycle, which is why it should be the critical optimization focus of CMOs. - Stepping up to lead the integrated, Converged Growth Go‑to‑Market organization
B2B CMOs, who are quite capable when it comes to orchestrating customer engagement to drive demand, are perhaps best positioned to play a key role in the go‑to‑market functional group, and in many cases are well positioned to lead it. The implication here of course is that CMOs can be an integral part of the growth/go-to-market function; however, CMOs with this focus (and a track record of driving commercial “Lift”) also are well-positioned to credibly ascend to the Chief Growth Officer Role.The major shift required for CMOs to drive integrated go-to-market organizational design is to move from functional design to process-based design. What do we mean? A functional org chart that depicts the hierarchy of entry-level to mid-level to senior level management — a nested reporting chart — fails to address the ‘role’ that key individuals play in various stages of the customer journey. As a result, we are likely to find significant gaps in customer journey stewardship. Process-based design rationalizes the complete set of roles required to move a customer through all stages of his/her journey — mapping these roles to different stages of the journey and ensuring the customer has continuous stewardship along his/her pre- and post-stage buying journey(s).
Lead, follow or get out of the way, as the adage goes. CMOs have a unique moment to do one of these three in 2024.
Forrester sums up the opportunity: “[Marketing leaders must] promulgate the notion that it is marketing’s destiny to be the mastermind of growth despite the turmoil of turbulent times. Don’t isolate expectations of ‘growth marketing’ or ‘performance marketing’ to a few programs or processes.”
