A few weeks ago, I attended a gathering of 40+ advisors, CEOs, and investors of early-stage companies. Spending quality time in person with these incredible companies and high-performance individuals proved inspiring. On the first night, I spoke with a well-known VC. We got into GTM strategies, which went down the pipeline generation rabbit hole.
These days, generating pipeline is harder than ever. We face so many channels, so much noise in the market, so much competition, and so many people competing for attention. As we discussed in our strategies for 2025, the game is clearly changing fast.
Today, I'm sharing four key strategies my VC buddy and I agreed on and why they'll work as we move into the new year.
When I look at how CMOs and CROs build their strategies - and this is the perfect time as we're deep into planning season 2025 - I see many outdated tactics and bloated channel spending. Standard ebooks, lead grab forms, lead magnets, and spray-and-pray outbound approaches keep losing effectiveness.
Companies still focus on speed and feed tactics rather than strategy. Why don't these work? Because we're inundated with stuff, and attention is challenging. Buyers are more discerning than ever with their inbox space and attention span. They won't give away their time for meaningless conversations. They want:
PS: Last point is not new!
You must do more than just churn out standard (fast) content. It adds noise to the market, especially on LinkedIn. My personal experience shows LinkedIn has become incredibly overwhelming. Strategies that worked for early adopters two to three years ago face serious execution challenges due to noise.
People using templated LinkedIn strategies now sound very, very similar. Here's a better approach: If you're in the HR tech space, instead of writing a simple "10 Ways to Improve Your LMS," create an entire playbook program and content hub:
This becomes your content hub and free resource. Now, every time you create content related to your HR playbook, you have a natural lead magnet to offer. Your goal for 2025 is to create content hubs that pair with the most relevant content across each platform. Remember: each piece of content should add to a follow-on next step that moves beyond awareness into action.
Marketing is building a product or service that tells a story—a true story that resonates and changes the person who experiences it.
We've long neglected the root causes of go-to-market success:
These fundamentals make your go-to-market strategy successful. Week after week, I review plans with extensive detail on tactics and processes but little detail on simple differentiation and marketing wedge strategy - how you'll win in the market and be differentiated.
Everyone follows the same playbook, but few obsess about differentiation. This fuzziness leads people to create more complex systems and processes to hide their need for a simple, clear view of strategy and execution. Look at Okta's recent conference—they summed up their 2025 strategy in a straightforward sentence.
From the OKTA conference this week:
GTM Strategy: “We’re planning for further specialization in our global go-to-market strategy to better align with the distinct identity buying centers of IT/security and developers. I’m confident this approach will benefit both our customers and Okta and drive better business outcomes for all.”
Simple” doesn’t mean you’re making a smaller impact or settling for less. It means choosing a strategy that puts you on the hook. It’s a chance to be meaningful and specific, not a wandering generality.
Make yours do the same.
Multi-channel sounds complicated, but keeping things simple can still mean multi-channel integration. Your acquisition strategy should seamlessly integrate across all marketing channels and touchpoints. I'm not suggesting spamming content everywhere—I mean creating a cohesive experience across channels.
I wrote years ago that building a marketing machine means connecting experiences and channels. That remains true today. Too many plans don’t show a clear thread showing how their channels interact, integrate, and connect as a holistic system. Why? People often design these processes while stuck inside their system rather than viewing them from outside.
My advice: Design your plan thinking outside your system to avoid getting stuck in the weeds or creating disconnected components. Make your acquisition feel natural no matter where someone encounters your content. Your ultimate goal: Add value at every touchpoint.
AI will likely become one of the most essential tools for optimizing go-to-market in 2025. Right now, martech and marketing heavily use AI for:
But imagine the future: leveraging agentic use cases integrated across your go-to-market to improve efficiency in outbound content, data, and research. Tasks previously done by humans will be embedded more systematically across your go-to-market.
People still use AI in a point-solution sense. Create a programmatic, systemized, integrated AI process across your go-to-market. This could increase your speed and output quality versus the competition.
Many 2025 go-to-market plans still focus on singular use cases that speed up individual job roles within sales and marketing. But they will only enable a little strategic leverage. The opportunities are unlimited and moving fast. I recommend making AI not just a component within your go-to-market strategy but a core element for increasing speed and improving outcomes. Use AI to make your efforts more efficient, so you can focus on creating value and working on differentiation and positioning.
GTM strategy keeps getting more sophisticated, personalized, and integrated with other aspects of business. Remember: Create the plan first. Ensure marketing and sales align their go-to-market planning with your core strategy. This is strategy working.
Revenue leaders who succeed will provide simple plans with highly focused channels for their ideal customers. AI will grow more sophisticated - leveraging it into a more coherent, systemized approach within your plan will help you execute better against fierce competition. Creative will be the key to differentiation; AI agents will commoditize execution basics.
Remember: Providing value across everything you do never go out of style. This remains human-led. Want to dive deeper into these strategies and turn your go-to market into a machine? I've recently launched a GTM accelerator program for 2025 to help implement this mindset into your business across the go-to-market.
A bespoke framework and capability model 'DEMAND KARMA' that delivers DD services to investors, VC firms and CEOs.
Retained advisory at funded scale-ups. A simple monthly fee. Helping CEOs build a scalable marketing machine. (Booked out until December)
Book time on my calendar to work through a standalone project or to get answers to your most pressing marketing strategy and execution questions.
