When it was time for startups to begin selling their products, they could rely on a variety of traditional playbooks. But, as is the case with so many others, AI has significantly altered how companies prepare to go to market.
“You can do more with less than you ever could,” Max Altschuler, a general partner at GTMfund, told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience last month.
The needle founders and operators will have to thread; however, it is a challenging one. Although there’s been some talk of startups hiring more generalist developers and setting them loose on typical GTM problems, he said the need for specialised domain expertise is greater.
“When you have great advisors around you, you get to learn some of those tried-and-true playbooks. Those things haven’t been thrown out the window. I do think you need an understanding of how and why things are working in marketing,” said Altschuler.
“It’s fair to say the craft of marketing is still very much needed,” said Alison Wagonfeld, the vice president of marketing at Google Cloud.
“You need the AI expertise, the AI curiosity, the technologists to be sure, but you also need to understand what marketing is about; understanding customer insights, doing research and knowing how to see great creative,” Wagonfeld said.
If you’re a team that’s gone for the AI punch, “You can just get out there with so many more messages faster, and then you can think more holistically around what metrics am I driving for,” she added.
Marc Manara, head of startups at OpenAI, said that in a lot of the startups he’s seen, AI is incorporated into their GTM strategy — it hasn’t always been that they want to do less with it, but as part of what they were doing.
“There is a movement of, yes, you can do more with less, but you also can be very focused on how you do it,” he said. “The level of personalisation and signal following that you can do with AI is really distinct now.”
“There are tools which help build leads that are much more sophisticated than what was there before,” he said. Unlike a dumb database query, EI queries can help startups find prospects who meet a VERY ATYPICAL set of requirements.
Inbound marketing has also transformed, he said, by which “the responses from those prompts have been used to qualify and score inbound leads with — let’s say — a lot more precision than in the past might have been in order.”
As a startup gears up to develop its go-to-market strategy, Wagonfeld added that it’s something to consider when evaluating the characteristics it likes in a GTM team.
“It’s a shift in perspective of how to hire, where in the past, when we hired, it was more of hiring specialists, people who really knew, sometimes even like a sub-speciality within marketing or within sales. And it really is looking for a sense of curiosity and comprehension now,” she added. “It’s darn near the No. 1 thing to hire for at this point.”
