Redefining go-to-market in a digital world: B2B strategies

During periods of strong macroeconomic performance, go-to-market inefficiencies may not be immediately apparent. However, during economic downturns, these weaknesses become more pronounced and are brought to the forefront. It is during these challenging times that everything becomes clearer, providing an opportunity for organisations to assess and address these issues to improve their competitiveness and overall success.

With the rise of digitalisation, new opportunities for go-to market teams abound — from data-driven processes to personalised campaigns. Sales reps have come a long way since the days of cold-calling from the yellow pages!

Businesses are re-thinking the entire customer journey, including the tools, processes and people that power it, all the while managing a tough economic climate and trying to stay one step ahead of new innovations. Let’s break down the key trends impacting the space.

1. Digital or bust.

With the pandemic accelerating the digitalisation of B2B sales, over 3/4 of buyers and sellers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote engagement over face-to-face interactions. The same goes for enterprise sales; 70% of decision makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases in excess of $50,000, and 27% would spend more than $500,000.

Indeed, this trend continues to grow, with Gartner predicting that by 2025 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

2. B2B buyers want the B2C experience.

Much like B2C buyers, today’s B2B buyers are getting increasingly self-educated. 94% of B2B buyers conduct online research at some point in the buying process, and peer recommendations influence more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions.

Now, they want the full B2C experience. B2B buyers no longer want tedious, long-winded buyer journeys, but instead, a customer-centric experience that is dynamic and tailored to their needs. For example:

• Buyers don’t want to engage with sales immediately. According to a survey run by Outreach, B2B buyers would prefer not to engage with a sales rep until the Explore (33%) or Buy phases (30%).
• We are expecting an increasing demand for personalisation. B2B buyers want to see product market fit right away, sellers now need to focus on tailored content, targeted sales engagement and product customisation.

3. From a siloed data stack to data-driven processes.

The typical journey of a B2B buyer is as follows: Go to supplier websites > Visit peer review sites > Attend supplier-hosted webinars > Join the supplier community > Go back to website > Watch demos > Start free trial / freemium subscription > Meet with a sales rep > Start the onboarding > Talk with customer success.

So how can businesses streamline and personalise this journey to give their customers the B2C experience they desire? The answer is in the data.

At every touchpoint along this journey, customers are offering up valuable data about their needs and preferences, but until recently most businesses have struggled to connect the dots. But the landscape is changing… First, we saw businesses starting with implementing data storage solutions for each department — CRMs for sales reps (Salesforce, HubSpot), CS platforms for CS teams (Zendesk) and product analytics tools for PMs (Amplitude, Mixpanel). Then came the implementation of sales enablement tools with customer data enrichment tools (ZoomInfo, Cognism), customer engagement tools (Outreach, Customer.io) and sales intelligence tools (Gong).

Now, it’s time to reunify those siloed data points with centralised, integrated tools and operational processes for the benefit of the entire organisation. Gartner predicts that 60% of B2B sales organisations will transition from experience and intuition based selling to data driven selling by 2025, merging the sales process, applications, data and analytics into a single operational practice.

We are actually seeing major players in the space taking the leap of consolidation. ZoomInfo has recently introduced their RevOps featured tool — which is an end-to-end platform that has similar capabilities that Salesloft and Gong have. Time will tell if they can successfully build strong software while keeping their core business of data enrichment quality. For additional analysis and advice on envelopment strategies — I recommend this post by Dave Kellogg, leading SaaS advisor and Balderton Executive in Residence.

4. The era of the CRO.

With the shift to more unified operational processes, we are in turn seeing an increasing demand for revenue operations managers. Recent layoffs also throw light on inefficiencies with go-to-market productivity measurements. Indeed, Salesforce CEO expressed concerns about productivity in parts of the sales organization: about half of Salesforce account executives brought in more than 95% of deals.

In July 2021 Forbes mentioned that thousands of organisations had introduced expanded “CXO” roles with titles like the Chief Growth Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and Chief Revenue Officer to run revenue operations. Indeed the number of Chief Revenue Officers (CRO) jobs have more than doubled to over 9,000 in the last three years. And this might be just the beginning. By 2025, Gartner expects that 75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a revenue operations model.

Overall, 2023 should give more power to operations in marketing, sales, customer success, product and even finance, enabling them to implement data-driven processes and bring more collaboration across teams.

5. New technologies fuelling innovations.

LLMs and in particular GPT-3 have the power to create a new generation of sales engagement, customer support and marketing tools by providing content personalisation and automation. The space is still pretty early but there are already some great examples, including Supernormal (a generative AI note-taking platform — and a new member of our Balderton portfolio), Lavender (a Sales email assistant) and Jasper.ai (an AI content generator for marketing teams).

Other disruptive technologies for go-to-market teams are part of the modern data stack — with data processing and analytics, data visualisation and data integrations with Reverse ETL technologies all offering game-changing potential for go-to-market teams.

6. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.

Last but certainly not least: driving go-to-market efficiency is the number one focus today. Founders need to show high growth but also a longer cash runway.

Balderton’s EIR Dave Kellogg shared some advice when speaking at SaaStock. Highlights include:

• Forecasting & pipeline management will be critical;
• Work better together within the GTM team and the company at large;
• Shoot at richer targets by refining ICP and focus on customer development;
• Improve efficiency by optimising funnel conversion rates, but with a plan and accountability for each lever.

Now that we have a sense of what’s top-of-mind for go-to-market teams in 2023, we can dig deeper into the B2B Go-To-Market tech stack and a few specific categories including RevOps, Product-Led Sales and Community Management. Stay tuned for the next blog post!