Entrepreneur
In a 15-year-plus go-to-market (GTM) strategy career, I have worked with hundreds of B2B companies directly, indirectly with other consultants or through any of the many accelerator programs I mentor on. During that time, I have seen a typical consistency that breaks all strategies — the lack of willingness to deep-dive research layered on poor proprietary data.
In most cases, customer-facing teams have been disjointed, arguing over tech stacks and creating barriers between marketing and sales, adding further complexity to an already complex and intricate process. Furthermore, the clamor for preferred technology puts distance between teams and restricts the ability to fully understand the customer and, therefore, the customer journey. Add that most customer success teams work with tools away from CRM, and it’s a data minefield. It is too complex and convoluted, so you cannot fully understand customer behavior through your funnels and pipelines.
Related: How to Build a Go-to-Market Strategy That Prevents Risk
So, how do you solve this and build a solid GTM strategy for 2025?
Firstly, take a deep dive assessment of your current status. Is your tech stack aligned? Are all teams using the same tools that share the same data? For instance, HubSpot has an interconnected sales, marketing and service tool to accurately track the customer journey from a stranger who doesn’t know your business to a paid customer advocating for your product or service.
That’s not to say other tech combinations cannot achieve the same. Still, companies are being tasked to become far more aligned with their technologies and data — hence the rise of Revenue Operations, which has become the number one demand for GTM teams since the end of the growth at all costs era we’ve just exited.
So, here it is. To build a fully aligned GTM strategy for 2025, you need the following:
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All teams must work from a connected data source centered around the CRM. This is why HubSpot is a great shout.
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Reports that track your data quality, ICP, average customer journey, deal velocity, churn and individual contributor performance
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Business unit heads that want to work with each other, not undermine each other
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Deep competitive analysis
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Historical proprietary data is preferred. If not, interview your intended customer through one of the many available platforms, such as Wynter or Respondent.
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Use AI to pull trends from your proprietary data focused on what works and what doesn’t
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Ensure you get deep on your segmentation. It’s not about topline identifiers like industry, employee size and so on, but understanding beyond that what intricacies made the people at those companies engage with you. Then, do more of that.
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Voice of the customer: You must have someone tasked with regular customer engagement and won and lost deal reviews. Automate the request through a workflow in your CRM so that all deals won or lost request a quick interview or use a form that stores the answers to your questions in your CRM. Remember, CRMs are AI-enabled now, so the more information you hold in them, the better your ability to craft winning sales and marketing campaigns, which improve the customer experience.
Related: How to Successfully Launch a Product in Under 90 Days
Go-to-market framework
Next, find a solid go-to-market framework for your business to use. If you are a B2B organization, look at the ARISE GTM Methodology®, which comprehensively covers you from assessing your current stage of play to relaunching a successful, aligned GTM strategy. A framework like ARISE makes it easy for small teams to launch big strategies, which is what leadership is asking for more and more often. In five steps, you can be up and running:
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Assess: Take a complete review of your performance, reporting, tech stack, agencies, individual contributors and metrics like payback and profitability.
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Research: Use AI to run competitive analysis, digest and interpret research and whitepapers, analyze your first-party data to look at where you fit in the market and build your differentiation.
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Ideate: Use these collective learnings in a cross-functional team workshop to bring your status quo, market opportunities and your team’s earned customer insights together to build ideas about how you move forward.
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Strategize: Formulate the ideas into strategy and campaigns that align with your new differentiation, positioning and messaging.
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Execute: Time to deliver and learn, pivot fast, scale faster with what works, and if you have good customers, work with them on your new messaging and positioning to make sure it lands.
This easy-to-follow process ensures that you can make a change and rerun the methodology year after year to keep it relevant.
Another thing to discuss is that you should never choose a tech stack before you have a strategy. This can lead to huge inefficiencies and underperformance in strategic execution. The job is not to buy the latest big buzz software tool but to build a plan and buy the best tools to enable it. With LinkedIn full of influencers jumping in with playbooks around tech stacks, it can be very easy to become overwhelmed and jump on a perceived success platform only to find that your team cannot execute it, and it sets you back again.
Related: 6 Key Things to Consider When Bringing a Product to Market
If all of this feels like too much, you can simplify it further to three questions:
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How do I communicate my value to the right audience?
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How do I enable my buyer to buy from me?
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How do I successfully onboard, upsell, cross-sell and retain my customers once I have them?
As a founder, these three simple questions are perfect to ask your business unit heads and set them on a path to working closely together to figure it out. So, the path to a new GTM strategy that works in 2025 can be straightforward; with this playbook, you should find it even easier to drive rewarding results with differentiated positioning, aligned teams and a tech stack that holds all customer data.
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