Best of LinkedIn: Go-to-Market CW 24/ 25

This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about go-to market in calendar weeks twenty four and twenty five. Frenis is a B to B Market Research Partner helping I C two and tech providers identify new channel partners. by compressing the full journey from identification to qualified first meeting into four or five weeks you can find more info Right, so if you're listening right now. You are probably watching your own sales teams or definitely your competitors' teams send out like ten thousand AI generated emails a week. Oh yeah totally it's just a flood right? know Exactly. And yet, if you look at the actual dashboards. The win rates are completely flat just totally stagnant which is crazy. because the whole promise of this massive AI wave was that it would act like a magic wand for revenue right? Yeah That was the pitch. You plug in a tool...you hit generate and suddenly the pipeline is overflowing Right. But instead of a Magic Wand what most B-to-B marketing professionals were actually dealing with now Is well A fire hose of noise. It really is I mean its classic trap Mistaking a technological capability for business strategy. We all just want the easy button. Oh, sure! Everyone wants to shortcut But practitioners who are actually moving their needle. right now. They're realizing that layering automation over broken process doesn't fix it. It makes the broken parts happen faster Exactly. So today our mission for this deep dive is to unpack the top go-to market trends we've seen across LinkedIn over the past two weeks. and what's emerging, you know it isn't a list of new prompts right thankfully yeah. It's actually a fundamental restructuring of how revenue teams operate. so We're gonna break this down into three core themes for you Right? So I'm going start with GTM strategy which is really getting the foundations right. then will move in to GTM engineering Which is honestly the hottest and probably most misunderstood new role out there. Totally misunderstood! And then finally, we'll dive into AI native GTM systems so looking at signaled outbound that actually converts instead of just going straight to the spam folder. I love that road map. So let's jump right in first part because before we get distracted by all this shiny new tools and technical roles We really have to establish none. it works without a rock solid foundation Right. And if we accept that, the best mental model for this actually came from Hila Lauterbach. She introduced this concept of the GTM iceberg. The iceberg? Yeah! That metaphor is so vivid It really is because it perfectly diagnoses why so many teams feel stuck right now. Hila points out everybody in industry just obsessing over top ten percent of iceberg. Right. Visible stuff. Stuff everyone can see. Exactly Your tactical demand gen, the premature scaling motions. The feature-led positioning on the website... Yeah this shiny stuff. but the real pipeline like the actual revenue engine that keeps the whole company afloat That's the ninety percent hidden below the surface Precisely and she is very specific about what that ninety percent actually. it by her truth research Which means what exactly? Like practically speaking It means getting out of your spreadsheets You know, and finding the exact unvarnished language your buyers actually use when they describe their pain. It's validating your ideal customer profile –your ICP– with real market pull Right not just a list of thermographics you bought from Zoom Info. Exactly And crucially it is unit economics! You have to know your customer acquisition cost before trying to pour fuel on fire. If those deep elements aren't solid…you are scaling business. You're just scaling a leak. Scaling a leak! Wow, that's a great way to put it. and that distinction between the visible tactics in The Hidden Logic. It completely changes how we should be looking at AI right now. Oh absolutely Yeah. Jane Sorensen-Hurthel shared an incredible use case That proves this perfectly. She was quoted something like eighteen thousand dollars In several weeks of senior developer time To build private AI advisor for her clients? Wow Eighteen grand. Yeah, but she actually ended up building it herself using Claude Cayet in just five weeks. That's wild. But the takeaway there wasn't just oh look AI is magic right? No exactly. The take away was that she could only build it because the hard part that ninety percent of the iceberg Was already completely done. her methodology and her business definitions were strictly defined before a single prompt was ever written. Right. And Christopher Gannon took that exact sentiment a step further. he had this pretty stark warning for revenue leaders. Oh, I remember this one. it was brutal! Yeah he argued that AI simply scales what already exists. so if your ICP is fuzzy or if your CRM data is a total mess... Which let's be honest everyone's CRM Data Is kind of a mess. right but If Your sales process changes depending on which rep happens to Be On The Call you haven't automated your strategy. You've just Automated Chaos Automated chaos. That's terrifying. It IS Because AI isn't going to invent a strategy for you. It's just gonna expose your broken systems and make that mess move at lightning speed. Okay, I hear that And i agree. But as a former sales rep myself... ...I always kind of think about the reality on the floor. Sure The day-to-day execution Right. It's great for us in marketing to have a perfectly validated ICP and this deeply researched positioning thesis sitting at a shared Google Drive A fifty-page document. nobody reads Exactly! If I'm an account executive on a live discovery call, the prospect suddenly throws a curveball at me? doesn't help me at all. No, it's useless in that moment right? It feels like we and marketing spend weeks building these massive beautiful encyclopedias And then we just hand them to a rep who is quite frankly actively on knife fight. Yeah That's very real disconnect. Amina R actually addressed the exact issue. She delivered some brutal truth for product marketers specifically. What did she say? She said sales are completely ignoring those fifty page GTM kits And they're definitely ignoring those mandatory hour-long enablement webinars. All one hundred percent, They are right. her argument is that enablement has to be weaponized in under three minutes. Weaponized enablement I mean that phrasing alone just changes the entire mandate for a marketing team. It really does. it forces you to be totally ruthless with your editing. Mina suggests boiling down a massive ten page launch brief into three bullet cheat sheet. Just three bullets? Who is this for, why do they care right now and how we win against the status quo? That's it! And she also advocates replacing those standard boring sixty minute feature dump demos with pitch video that a rep can just watch between calls. Right, something they could pull up on their phone in the elevator? Exactly! And most importantly building single-page battle cards for the real objections are actually losing deals on the floor. Uh... right Not theoretical objections we brainstormed into some sterile marketing meeting room. Exactly. Real objections Which means you have to listen to sales calls and know what those objections are. Imagine that. Right. Speaking of knowing whats happening Ph.D Brahmar offered this really brilliant framework for measuring if any of the strategy is even working. Oh, I liked his take on this. Yeah he noted that most leadership teams they start their GTM reviews by Staring at pipeline metrics win rates conversion numbers That sort-of thing right? The classic dashboard review exactly. But he points out that those are lagging indicators. He says the very first question in that meeting should always be What has changed what? Has changed in the buyer's behavior. Yes, what has changed in buyer behavior? What is changing the macroeconomic market? because growth problems always originate out there In the market reality long before they ever show up as a red number and a hub spot dashboard. That it so true. So okay if we assume a team has done all this hard work They've built The Deep Iceberg. they weaponize the enablement. they actually understand the market shifts. the immediate question becomes operational. right like Who is actually capable of building the technology to support all this? Exactly. Because traditional IT, they generally don't understand the nuance of a complex sales motion and your best sales reps certainly don't know how to write API scripts. No definitely not. Which brings us to the second theme And probably most fascinating organizational shifts we saw over the last two weeks The explosion Of the GTM engineer. The GTM Engineer It's everywhere right now. Kieran Crone and Doug Levin both spent time defining this role, it really is a completely new paradigm. It is because the GTM engineer isn't just a rebranded ref ops analyst who builds sales course reports, right? Right. And they aren't traditional software developer building your core source product either. Levin describes them as sitting at the exact intersection of data engineering automation and revenue logic Revenue logic being the key there. They are the ones actually building engine. that turns raw intense signal into qualified pipeline opportunity Exactly. But As this roll gets super hyped up Tim Hillison and Tim Jacobson pointed out a massive trap that companies are already falling into. Yeah, the failure rate on these hires is actually kind of shocking. it. Is they noted? That A lot Of These newly Hired GTM engineers Are Completely Failing. And The Crazy Part Is It's Rarely Because They Lack Technical Skill Right Yacobson Called At The Plumbing Problem. They Fail because They Focus Entirely on the tools rather than the business problem. Right, just connecting pipes? Exactly! For context these engineers are often working with pools like clay to scrape and enrich data an N-aid aim to build these incredibly complex automation workflows And then pulling it all into a CRM. Yeah which sounds great on paper It does. But Hillison warned that an engineer can build a workflow That enriches the data perfectly routes the leads without a flaw, scores them dynamically, summarizes the transcripts with out single bug. And still completely fail? Yes! Because they solved entirely wrong problem... because didn't take time to understand buyer's journey first. See my immediate fear here like if I'm running revenue team is that we are just creating brand new silo. Oh absolutely thats huge risk. Are these GTM engineers supposed to just replace our old rev ops generalists? Because if we have this highly technical person hyper focused on tool maintenance and API connections, I feel like they might completely lose sight of the messy human reality. Of the sales floor. that's a really valid concern in. Tom Shamish actually weighed in on that exact tension. yeah his answer is a definitive no. okay so they don't replace them. No, the GTM engineer will not kill the revops generalist. The general is still absolutely vital because they are the ones who maintain that centralized Holistic view of the business, right? You need someone who understands The big picture exactly. you cannot design a strong technical process if you don't understand the stakeholder attention the Quota logic. You know compensation comp plans Right. If the tech doesn't match how their reps get paid They just won't use it Exactly. but the technical layer has simply become way too deep and to complex for one person To do both jobs anymore. you need the revops generalists to architect this strategy And the GTM engineer to actually build the deep infrastructure. that makes sense. But um Finding that specific technical talent right now seems nearly impossible. It's incredibly hard. Yeah, John Kim shared some data showing that a full third of all GTM engineer job postings are completely mislabeled by HR departments. Right Now? A third? wow yeah companies Are just slapping the trendy GTM Engineer title on a job description to get clicks. But when you actually read the requirements they Just want a junior admin To manage a sales force ticket queue. That is so frustrating for candidates. And honestly, the talent pool was already incredibly thin. because it's such a new discipline? Right! So what do you if need one? Well Petra Hadjahl pointed out that most candidates right now are just rebranding from adjacent roles like. maybe they've built a few Zapier workflows but completely lack true end-to-end architecture experience. It's risky to hire someone off of street. Very Her advice for founders trying to build this capability today is highly practical. She says, you use a hybrid approach. Okay! A Hybrid Approach. How does that work? You pair an in-house operator who deeply deeply understands your specific business context Your buyers and your edge cases with experienced external agency. Oh I see Yeah The in house person anchors the strategy And the Agency builds complex architecture. It accelerates your learning curve, and it prevents a single point of failure if that one internal employee decides to leave. That makes a lot sense. you basically rent the deep technical expertise while completely owning The business logic. exactly so all right. We have this strategy anchored down And we have the engineers in place to build the infrastructure. What does that machine actually look like? when? You turn it on. let's transition To this third area AI native GTM systems and how they're Completely changing outbound. yeah This is where gets really fun To understand what these systems are doing, we have to kind of reframe how we view AI's role in the tech stack right now. Okay, reframe it How? Well Smith and shared a brilliant observation. He was looking at data that showed massive AI adoption across companies But he noticed very few companies were actually ripping out their old software tools Right. they were just adding AI on top Exactly. And you realize the market was completely misreading the trend. AI isn't replacing our tech stack, it is replacing the manual handoffs between the tools. Oh wow! It's replacing the human glue? Yes...the human glue. Think about a typical SDRs day just a year ago. They would spend hours manually copying a prospects name from a LinkedIn profile pasting into data provider to find their email pasting that in a spreadsheet to verify against ICP rules. Just endless copying and pasting Right And then finally pasting it all into HubSpot. AI is just eating those manual repetitive workflows.". It IS, and Kumar in Emerith Ongum gave a perfect real-world example of this in action! He was operating as the solo RevOps manager...and he realized that he'd become THE MASSIVE BOTTLENECK for his entire sales team! Let me guess…MANUAL LIST PULS? Exactly! Every time a rep needed a list of accounts to target they had submit a manual ticket And it would take him hours or sometimes days to fulfill. It totally kills the momentum, right? So to fix this he built a self-serve lead system using Claude clay and Apollo. now The sales reps just fill out a simple structured form with their criteria and the system does the rest. Yep Yeah, I system received the form automatically queries the databases enriches the contacts checks them against the company's strict ICP rules and then Just drops the qualified leads directly into the CRM assigned to the right owner. That is incredible. The reps pull their own data instantly, and Kumerin gets to actually go back to strategic work. Exactly. But we have to caution people here. Setting up a system that's sophisticated requires way more than just opening chat GPT in typing a paragraph. Oh for sure you can't just wing then. No Kyle Poyar outlined a four-layer AI system that is rapidly becoming the standard for teams who are actually doing this right. You cannot just treat AI as single big brain. Okay, so what of the four layers? He breaks it down into context skills orchestration and integrations Context Skills Orchestration and Integrations okay break those down. for me Think about the context layer As the AIs long term memory. It holds your foundational documents Your brand voice Your ICP. Its how The AI Actually Knows Who Your Company Is Got it. and the skills layer. The skills layer acts as the muscle. these are very specific modular prompts that turn that context into a targeted output like drafting an ad or writing a specific email sequence. okay so if skills were the muscle orchestration must be the brain kind of like the manager. yeah yeah orchestration decides which skills need to be run in what exact order? And then finally, the integrations layer represents That's pushing and pulling live data via APIs to the rest of the world. That is such a clear way to visualize it, And if you don't separate those out things break down really quickly right? They fall apart instantly. Nikola Siljenowski highlighted this. He warned that GTM teams are leaking massive amounts value because they try run their entire departmental motion inside single-clawed chat window. Oh man just one endless thread Right! Because of token limits in context windows If we use long chat threads The AI eventually forgets your early instructions. It literally gets amnesia, right? So what's his solution? he says you have to use the right product interface for the job Use projects to securely store all that context and documentation and use code for the GTM engineers who are actually building those automated workflows we talked about. Okay, but here is where I have to step in with. bring on the dread. If every single company on Earth builds these exact same AI agents, right? And they're pulling from the exact same Apollo databases and their running the exactsame structured outbound playbooks won't our buyers inboxes just look like a robot convention? Yes How do we avoid becoming a copy of a copy? That is the defining question for Outbound Marketing today. Nick Rajarai addressed it with some incredibly fiery advice. What does he say? He pointed That every cold email he receives right now sounds like it was written by the exact same robot Because it was. Right, The classic hope this finds you. well AI speak. exactly his advice. stop outsourcing your voice to AI. if Your outreach sounds like every other generic founder who quote-unquote learned? This is a hard way. You are going to be instantly deleted. Instantly authentic opinionated highly specific Outreach Is literally the only thing that breaks through the noise right now. I totally agree with that, but how do you actually scale authenticity? Because you can't have reps handwrite thousands of emails a week anymore. The mass just doesn't work! You don't scale the writing You change the trigger. The answer lies in signaled outbound.". Okay, signaled-outbound? "...you stop blasting static lists of ten thousand people who just happen to have the title VP Of Marketing. instead you wait for an intense signal that proves they had a problem right this second...". Yeah okay...Sunderass actually shared a case study on. it completely blew my mind. Oh! This seven percent one Yes He analyzed team that achieved A Seven Percent Cold Outreach Reply Rate And in today's market, where people are getting half a percent seven percent is just astronomical. It's unheard of how do they. They achieved it by completely abandoning static lists. Instead, they built a system to target buyers who were already actively engaging with competitors or industry influencers in public forums. So they were monitoring intent? Exactly! They set up monitors for people commenting on specific LinkedIn posts about the exact pain points their software solved. By the time the SDR actually reached out… It wasn't cold interruption anymore – there was simply entering conversation that buyer was already having. smart and to operationalize that kind of thing, Bill Stathopoulos emphasized you have build a custom map for your specific business. Right because my signals aren't your signals? Exactly he braced them down into three tiers. first party signals which is own data. so who was visiting high intent pricing pages or hitting usage limit in freemium product? the stuff control right. then there's second-party Those come from your partner ecosystems, like who is engaging with the Slack communities you are a part of or Who's attending? Your partners webinars got it. and The third tier Third-party signals our market wide data Like a company suddenly posting five job openings for A very specific technical role Or announcing a series B funding round. Okay So you layer all those up yes And You only trigger the AI outreach when that context Is completely fresh. It's really at the difference between Tapping someone on the shoulder when they are actively looking at a map and asking for directions versus just screaming at them with a megaphone while They're trying to eat their lunch. That's the perfect analogy. Relevance has completely replaced personalization. it really does. And you know as we wrap up all of these insights from The strategy icebergs or engineering plumbing, signal-led systems I want To leave You With A final somewhat provocative thought that was inspired by stu Schmidt. Lay it on me. We have spent this entire deep dive talking about AI systems and automation, and tech stacks right? But Stu points out a looming reality. these AI capabilities are rapidly becoming completely commoditized. very soon literally every company will have the ability to generate a grammatically perfect highly researched hyper personalized cold email in about three seconds. Right The Tech won't be special anymore. Exactly When perfection is commoditized AI itself, it's no longer your competitive advantage in the very near future. The only real motes you will have left are your proprietary high value data and your profoundly human relationships. Wow That is a powerful place to end. If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks! Also check out our other editions on account-based marketing, field marketing, channel marketing, MarTechs social selling and AI in BtoB Marketing. Yeah thank you so much for joining us as we unpack the reality behind all of that noise today. We really appreciate your time with us. Don't forget to hit subscribe. So never miss an edition. And remember... The next time you're tempted just plug into a new AI tool hoping for magic wand. Ask yourself if you're actually building a foundation or just automating the chaos. See ya next time!