// go-to-market strategy

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Aug 30

Startups Rebrand Customer Service as "Forward-Deployed" AI Work

By adopting military terminology, AI startups are attempting to elevate low-status implementation and support roles into something that sounds strategic and prestigious—a classic move when labor markets tighten and worker expectations shift. Companies can't find enough people willing to do technical hand-holding and setup work at startup wages, so they're dressing it up linguistically rather than changing compensation or autonomy. This points to a growing gap between the skilled labor AI companies actually need deployed at customers and what they're willing to pay for it.

theme-brand go-to-market strategy partner ecosystem sales enablement

Jul 30

Partner ecosystems face forced reckoning on AI-driven go-to-market

Source: Featured Blogs - Forrester

B2B companies have been optimizing internal AI productivity while their partner networks—resellers, agencies, integrators—fall further behind in GTM capability. This gap threatens deal velocity and customer experience. Vendors who don't operationalize partner AI enablement will watch deals flow to platforms offering integrated intelligence to the entire ecosystem. Traditional margin structures and training models collapse when a partner can't match the speed and precision of an AI-augmented competitor.

theme-brand go-to-market strategy sales strategy founder strategy

Jul 27

The Fortune 100 Trap: Why AI Startups Are Wasting Time Chasing Big Customers

Source: a16z

Andreessen Horowitz has identified a founder mistake: chasing prestige logos at Fortune 100 companies as a growth lever. These deals require sales cycles that span multiple funding rounds and lock engineering resources without closing. The alternative is building "lighthouse" products that gain velocity through smaller, faster-converting segments first—a constraint that enforces product-market fit discipline.

theme-brand go-to-market strategy product adoption autonomous agents

Jul 20

Autonomous Agents Are Reshaping How Companies Execute Sales

Source: The Next Web

After a year of experimental adoption, AI agents are moving into operational GTM workflows—companies are using them to automate lead qualification, customer outreach sequencing, and sales intelligence gathering. The competitive advantage lies not in owning the agent technology itself, but in building institutional knowledge (what some call the "company brain") that trains these systems on proprietary customer data, playbooks, and market positioning. This shifts GTM strategy from hiring more salespeople to systematizing institutional knowledge and creating feedback loops where agent performance directly improves core business processes.

theme-brand sales training go-to-market strategy talent development

Jul 9

AI Role-Play Replaces Traditional Sales Training Drills

Source: Featured Blogs - Forrester

Sales teams are moving from scripted role-play drills to AI-powered simulations that replicate actual customer interactions with variable conditions and unpredictable responses. Traditional role-play training—where colleagues read canned objections—leaves reps unprepared for the messiness of real deals. AI systems can generate hundreds of realistic scenarios and provide immediate feedback at scale. The result is faster rep productivity and higher close rates, but training outcomes now depend on whoever builds the AI scenarios, raising questions about whose customer insights and selling philosophy get encoded into the system.

theme-brand product-led growth go-to-market strategy digital commerce

Jun 16

Why B2B Companies' PLG Claims Don't Match Reality

Source: Featured Blogs - Forrester

Forrester is identifying a credibility gap between B2B vendors marketing themselves as "product-led growth" companies and what their actual digital commerce experiences reveal—suggesting PLG has become a positioning claim disconnected from operational execution. Companies are using trendy GTM language without restructuring their sales and customer acquisition funnels, which leaves money on the table and creates friction for buyers expecting self-serve experiences. B2B vendors who haven't eliminated gatekeeping from their buying processes will face pressure to align claims with practice.