Forrester: The GTM Singularity Is Collapsing Traditional Go-To-Market Approaches
Unveiled at B2B Summit North America, Forrester's GTM singularity research urges B2B leaders to shed old go-to-market principles as buying gets more complex
Forrester's (NASDAQ:FORR) latest research, The GTM Singularity Is Here, unveiled today at B2B Summit North America, is a clarion call to B2B leaders across marketing, sales, customer success, and product functions to finally discard decades-old go-to-market (GTM) practices and embrace a new ARC (augmented, resilient, and collaborative) GTM approach that engages today's AI-enabled buyers and customers.
Despite years of volatility driven by changing buyer behavior and unprecedented information access, B2B firms have failed to change how they engage with buyers — clinging to ineffective marketing practices such as impersonal mass emailing, marketing-qualified lead obsession, gated content, and siloed teams. AI is quickly making these practices untenable as it transforms buyer journeys and hands even more power to buyers.
As the GTM singularity takes hold, B2B firms must operate with a customer-obsessed go-to-market mindset and align their offerings to the outcomes their customers value. Forrester urges leaders to adopt a new GTM approach based on these ARC principles:
- Augmented: As AI agents augment the B2B GTM workforce, leaders will connect AI agents to key B2B GTM initiatives. At the same time, leaders will treat buyer agents as members of the buying network and supply them with relevant content. The goal of this human and machine augmentation must be to amplify value for the customer.
- Resilient: Most firms update their GTM plans annually at most. But as buyer behavior shifts faster and volatility rises, the GTM singularity presents the opportunity to abandon static approaches that no longer serve the company or the customer and instead anchor decisions in customer needs.
- Collaborative: Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams still operate in silos. Collaboration necessitates a shared, unified view of the prospect and customer, requiring transparency across teams.
Additionally, Forrester outlines the following best practices for B2B leaders to thrive in the GTM singularity era:
- Overcome the visibility vacuum to earn the right to engage. When buyers turn to answer engines, they seek information to make confident decisions. As a result, B2B leaders need to design content for humans, buyer agents, and answer engines alike. This requires more personalized and ungated information, delivered at scale through sharper segmentation and more nuanced personas.
- Prioritize preference-building to influence decisive buyers. With purchase and retention decisions hinging on vendor perceptions, building preference early and throughout the buyer journey is critical. This means dismantling the divide between brand and demand and ensuring that the clarity of messaging permeates the full buying network.
- Drive an accountability reset to advance client objectives. GTM teams face growing pressure to prove business impact in AI-enabled buying environments. Since most teams still rely on buyer engagement metrics, however, which are no longer an accurate indicator of performance in AI-driven buying, B2B firms should codify a return on objective (ROO) approach that ties metrics more directly to customer goals.
- Calibrate the work of humans and AI to amplify the value of both. While AI agents are learning to reason and mimic seasoned B2B GTM professionals, humans will remain GTM's most valuable asset, even as roles evolve through AI augmentation, cocreation, and simulation. To ensure that AI amplifies rather than replaces human impact, onboard AI agents as roles, not tools, and shift focus from automation to outcomes.
"The GTM singularity is a reckoning for B2B leaders — forcing them to rethink their mandate entirely, including how they market, sell, and deliver their offerings to buyers to maximize customer value and drive business growth," said Dave Frankland, event host, vice president, and research director at Forrester. "The impact of the GTM singularity will be seismic, requiring B2B firms to let go of entrenched practices and establish new ways of working. But it is also an opportunity for B2B leaders to rethink how they establish trust and build relationships with their prospects, clients, and beyond."
Resources:
- Learn more about the GTM singularity and how to pivot to a GTM approach suitable for the AI era.
- Follow @Forrester and #ForrB2BSummit for updates.
About Forrester
Forrester (NASDAQ:FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, revenue, and product functions to make confident decisions in an AI-driven world and accelerate growth through customer obsession. Our unique research and continuous guidance model helps executives and their teams achieve their initiatives and outcomes faster and with confidence. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.
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Amanda Chordas
achordas@forrester.com