AI Forces Go-to-Market Strategy

Traditional go-to-market (GTM) models are on the verge of collapsing as a result of what Forrester Research calls a “GTM singularity.”

Forrester describes the GTM singularity as “a moment of urgent, inevitable, and profound change in the norms and practices that B2B GTM leaders across marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams have long relied on” and where buyers, buyer agents, and answer engines now control how information is discovered and evaluated.

The research firm found that despite dramatic shifts in buyer behavior, most B2B firms are still relying on outdated GTM practices, such as mass email campaigns, marketing-qualified-lead-driven metrics, and siloed teams, approaches that it says are increasingly ineffective in an AI-driven buying environment.

Once that event horizon is reached, which Forrester expects to occur sometime soon, the old rules governing buyer and seller behavior will no longer apply.

As a result, success will depend on companies adopting new GTM principles. Those that don’t will “collapse under the weight of flawed practices,” Forrester cautions.

The research firm recommends that companies adopt ARC (augmented, resilient, and collaborative) principles anchored in customer outcomes.

Leading GTM teams are using AI to augment their capabilities by automating tasks, driving productivity, and accelerating decision making, according to Forrester. The technology provides B2B customers with consistent experiences.

“Large language models won’t cite content that isn’t credible, coherent, and consistent,” the research firm says. This is becoming more important as AI search volume skyrockets. Enterprises that don’t offer clarity, credibility and distinctiveness will lose credibility, and distinctiveness will lose customer trust, Forrester warns.

Forrester notes that optimizing websites and other messaging for keywords doesn’t produce the results it once did, noting that content should now be optimized for AI searches.

According to Forrester, leading companies have fluid, adaptable GTM plans, and as buyer behavior shifts and volatility rises, customer-obsessed companies tweak their anchoring decisions regarding customer needs, building trust, maintaining budget flexibility, and embracing new technologies.

Leading GTM teams push beyond their comfort zones and actively educate their stakeholders, including CEOs, chief financial officers, and board members to embrace disciplined risk management to confidently weather future volatility, according to the research firm.

The research also found that most companies still have sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams that operate in silos. However, within companies with leading GTM practices, these teams collaborate and intertwine their activities to eliminate gaps between priorities, plans, activities, and metrics, Forrester says.

“Collaboration necessitates a shared, unified view of the prospect and customer, but it can’t stop there,” the research firm says. “It demands trust and coordination that requires transparency across teams.”

Leading companies, it continues, go a step further, widening collaboration and transparency to include service and support, partners, finance, and legal functions.

However, relatively few organizations have a true, customer-obsessed GTM approach, according to Forrester. Leading GTM teams align their strategies with customers in a way that incremental change never could. “Now is the time to rethink your mandate entirely, re-imagining how you market, sell, and deliver your offering portfolio to buyers to maximize customer value and business growth.”

Now that B2B buyers are increasingly turning to answer engines rather than search engines, they are increasingly invisible to GTM teams. So enterprises need to rethink how they engage with prospects and customers because they are increasingly relying on answers from other sources, rather than search results, Forrester suggests.

As a result, companies need to redesign content, Forrester says. “This demands more granular, personalized, and ungated information delivered at scale through sharper segmentation and more nuanced personas, with messaging that is informative, conversational, and consistent.”

So websites will need to dynamically adapt to the distinct needs of visitors, be they humans or bots, it adds.

As GTM singularity takes hold, Forrester says that CEOs will no longer be able to shirk their GTM responsibility; AI-native firms will become acquisition magnets; and creativity and empathy will regain their strategic relevance.

Forrester recommends that companies do the following:

• Prioritize preference building to influence decisive buyers.
• Drive an accountability reset to advance client objectives.
• Calibrate the work of humans and AI to amplify the value of both.
• Fuse strategy and execution to prioritize focus.
• Design content and engagement for humans and machines simultaneously as AI reshapes who controls the buying journey and buyers increasingly rely on answer engines and AI agents.
• Align around a unified view of the buyer to compete in complex buying networks where collaboration is now a growth requirement.
• Replace legacy engagement metrics with a “return on objective” (ROO) model tied directly to customer goals and business impact.