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Workshop 1
GTM in an AI World
The first workshop, "GTM in an AI World," focused on the transformative impact of generative AI on go-to-market strategies. GTM experts offered insights on effective tactics such as Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and LinkedIn outreach.
Industry experts included:
Workshop Sketch Summary:
Resources:
- Appify is a no-code business app platform that enables businesses to create secure enterprise-grade apps that can be linked to existing systems.
- Apollo is a B2B sales intelligence and engagement platform that helps businesses find, engage, and close more deals faster.
- Front.com is a customer service platform and shared inbox software designed to centralize and streamline customer communication across various channels.
- GummySearch helps you find potential customers and sales opportunities by monitoring Reddit conversations for relevant keywords.
- Hunter is an all-in-one email outreach platform that helps users find, verify, and send cold emails.
- Instantly helps you find warm leads, scale email campaigns, reach primary inboxes, engage smarter and win more with AI.
- Linked Helper is a LinkedIn automation tool, specifically a desktop application, designed to automate tasks like sending connection requests, messages, and endorsements on LinkedIn.
- 6sense provides data and insights, including intent data and buying signals, to help companies identify and target the right accounts at the right time with the right message.
- Dripify is a well-known LinkedIn automation tool designed to help businesses create drip campaigns across platforms.
- Zapier is a web automation tool that allows users to connect and automate tasks between different online apps and services without needing to code.
Remember:
Keep it human and integrated
Frame it like you’re going back-to school
Make sure youre getting credit for your work!
Background:
In Nov/Dec 2024, we started hearing rumblings from larger ($5-10m) Triangle startups - their typically lead generating strategies weren’t working as well. Specifically:
These are companies with 3-5+ years of work building great content to drive traffic that was delivering consistent quality leads and it is falling off a cliff.
Historically effective organic/inbound strategy refresher
For decades as a startup one of the cheapest and most effective ways to get customers was to put unique content out into the market about your space and leverage that to increase awareness for your company. Another huge strategy that was driven out of necessity due to Google’s effective monopoly on search was Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - here you would learn all about the Google algorithm (PageRank, so on and so forth) and utilize strategies to increase your position - some paid, some un-paid and in many cases dramatically increase your ‘share’ of free traffic from the great Google traffic engine in the sky.
We didn’t have a fancy name for this strategy - I always called it a ‘content strategy’, some marketers called it ‘organic’. The alternative is ‘paid media’ where you go out there and buy Google ads (pay-per-click), banner ads (pay-per-million views) and so forth.
Inbound marketing is born!
Then in 2005, the founders of HubSpot (Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah), this strategy ‘inbound marketing’ and what I called above the ‘paid media’ as outbound marketing.
This makes a ton of sense:
Most companies do both and you get this nice blend that reduces your cost to acquire customers (CAC). Here’s an example from the early days of ChannelAdvisor.
We had a unique solution for businesses to sell on eBay and Amazon. Of course we bought the google search terms ‘sell on ebay’, ‘sell on amazon’ and all that.
But that’s very ‘bottom of the funnel’ - people only search on those terms when they have made a decision. Top of the funnel, we would put out a lot of content around: “Why should an apparel brand consider selling on Amazon?’, or “What’s a good strategy for selling on eBay as an apparel brand” - content like that.
In the early days of a new category like e-commerce, if you get that great content out there, it can be at the top of search results for years if not decades. The cost maybe was $200 all in to write that piece but it generated maybe $20m in revenue for 10yrs if you can believe it. That’s a pretty good ROI ;-).
This has gotten harder over the years as HubSpot hs popularized and automated the process. The hard part has been the ‘unique’ part - the world is moving so fast and many companies have outsourced content farms that it was hard to find something unique.
SEO arms race
Along the way, a massive industry (estimated to be > $20b/yr in the usa) around SEO has grown up and it’s all about staying in front of Google’s changes, many largely designed to thwart the latest SEO tricks that can pollute the search results and impact the experience.
This graphic from one SEO firm, , is a good example. These are the MAJOR updates, inside of here are a ton of minor updates that are constantly disrupting the SEO industry and organic google search traffic:
Anecdotally, somewhere around 2022/2023 as a Google user, the quality just fell off a cliff - the ‘search spammers’ had won - across paid and organic. Except for local content where Google Maps comes in, I find Google’s effectiveness at finding information has broken. The search spammers have won.
The Importance of Inbound
How important is this?
Said another way, every company from startups to large companies could see their marketing budget double if organic traffic ‘disappears’.
What the !@#!@# changed in Q4?
In Q4 last year, starting in October, but then accelerating into the end of the year, we started hearing from Triangle Startups that inbound traffic had fallen off a cliff. Was it seasonal, what was going on. As we dug in and met with more companies we started to put together a picture of three factors:
To put this in perspective, we see 5% and maybe 10% changes as part of this strategy, you take two steps back and then three forward. But in Q4 many people saw 30-80-90% decreases in organic traffic.
I’ve been at this 30 years and never seen anything like it - it’s the top concern from every later stage company we talk to.
9 Strategies for the ‘GenAI GTM Era’
After talking to many many of our portfolio companies that are fighting this in the trenches right here in the Triangle, scouring the internet, talking to leading edge SEO practitioners we have identified 9 strategies for the GenAI Go-To-Market Era. I feel confident not only will these 100% counteract the impact you are feeling, but it will also set you up to kick the butt’s of those incumbents who can’t lean into this as much as startups can. In this post we’ll
Strategies vs. Tactics
Strategy and tactics are two of these ‘overloaded’ terms in business. For the purposes of this series, we’re going to go with this definition:
In this article we’re going to focus on the big-picture strategies so you can get a feel for which of the 9 GenAI Era GTM Strategies you want to utilize. In the subsequent parts of this series, we will peel the onion on each strategy
Also note that these strategies are all intertwined, we’ve done our best to make them atomic, but by their nature they will have multiplicative effects when used together.
Goal:
Our goal here is two fold.
Finally we have a META GOAL:
We believe that if the Triangle Startup ecosystem solves the Organic Traffic /GenAI Era GTM Challenge faster than, oh say, Silicon Valley, or Austin, it could very well accelerate our climb up the top startup ecosystem ranks.
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