How OpenAI and Google see AI changing go-to-market strategies

For years, when it came time for startups to start selling their product, they could turn to any number of traditional books. But as with so many things, AI is changing the way companies prepare to go to market.

“You can do more with less than ever before” Max Altshulergeneral partner at GTMfund, told the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt last month.

The challenge for founders and operators, however, will be to thread the needle. While there has been some talk of startups hiring more experienced developers and losing them on typical GTM problems, he said, there is still a need for more domain-specific expertise.

“When you have great advisors around you, you can learn some of the tried and true books. That stuff hasn’t gone out the window. I think it’s still necessary to have a general understanding of how and why certain things work in marketing,” Altschuler said.

Alison Wagonfeldvice president of marketing at Google Cloud, said the art of marketing is still very much in demand.

“You definitely need the AI ​​knowledge, the AI ​​curiosity, the technologists, but also to understand what the purpose of marketing is, to understand customer insights, to do research, to see what great creative looks like,” Wagonfeld said.

But teams that adopt AI can move faster “You can just get out there with so many more messages faster and then think more holistically about what metrics I’m driving for,” he added.

Mark Manarahead of startups at OpenAI, found that many startups have embraced AI in their GTM strategy, although it’s not necessarily focused on minimizing their resources for it.

“There’s a movement, yes, you can do more with less, but you can also be very focused on how you do it,” he said. “The degree of personalization and signal following that you can do with AI is now differentiating.”

In particular, he said there are tools to help generate leads that are much more sophisticated than in the past. Instead of a simple query of a database, AI prompts can help startups find leads that fit a very specific set of requirements.

Inbound marketing has also changed, he added, using the results of these prompts to qualify and win inbound customers “much more accurately than could have been done in the past.”

When it’s time for a startup to start creating its go-to-market strategy, Wagonfeld said it’s important to consider what qualities it might want in a GTM team.

“It’s a shift in the perspective of hiring, where in the past it was more about hiring experts, people who really knew, sometimes even like a subspecialty in marketing or sales. And now it’s hiring for a sense of curiosity and understanding,” he said. “It’s pretty much the top thing to recruit right now.”