Key takeaways:
- B2B leaders must adopt a customer-obsessed GTM approach, leveraging AI to enhance buyer engagement and collaboration across teams.
- Forrester’s ARC principles (Augmented, Resilient, Collaborative) emphasize personalized content, preference-building, and aligning human and AI efforts for success.
It’s time for go-to-market (GTM) teams to rip up the old playbook and start from scratch in order to grow their business in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).
That is the message that Forrester delivered at their B2B Summit North America, derived from the latest research, The GTM Singularity Is Here.
Despite years of changing buyer behavior and information access, B2B firms have failed to change how they engage with buyers as they continued to use ineffective marketing practices such as impersonal mass emailing, marketing-qualified lead obsession, gated content, and siloed teams. According to Forrester officials, AI is quickly making these practices untenable as it transforms buyer journeys and hands even more power to buyers.
A Call to B2B Marketers
Dave Frankland, research director at Forrester, sees the report as a clarion call to B2B leaders across marketing, sales, customer success, and product functions to finally discard decades-old GTM practices and embrace a new approach that engages today’s AI-enabled buyers and customers.
“The GTM singularity is a reckoning for B2B leaders— forcing them to rethink their mandate entirely, including how they market, sell, and deliver their offerings to buyers to maximize customer value and drive business growth,” said Frankland in a statement. “The impact of the GTM singularity will be seismic, requiring B2B firms to let go of entrenched practices and establish new ways of working.”
What is Forrester’s ARC?
Forrester is advocating for B2B firms to operate with a customer-obsessed go-to-market mindset that are adhere to three principles of Augmented, Resilient and Collaborative (ARC). As AI agents augment the B2B GTM workforce, leaders should be focused on connect AI agents to key B2B GTM initiatives. At the same time, leaders treat buyer agents as members of the buying network and supply them with relevant content. The goal of this human and machine augmentation must be to amplify value for the customer.
As for being resilient, Forrester notes firms update their GTM plans annually at most. But as buyer behavior shifts faster and volatility rises, the GTM singularity presents the opportunity to abandon static approaches that no longer serve the company or the customer and instead anchor decisions in customer needs. This needs to be done collaboratively—sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams still operate in silos. Collaboration necessitates a shared, unified view of the prospect and customer, requiring transparency across teams.
Four Practices to Achieve B2B Success
Forrester outlines four best practices for B2B leaders to have success in the GTM singularity era:
- Overcome the visibility vacuum to earn the right to engage. B2B leaders need to design content for humans, buyer agents, and answer engines alike. This requires more personalized and ungated information, delivered at scale through sharper segmentation and more nuanced personas.
- Prioritize preference-building to influence decisive buyers.With purchase and retention decisions hinging on vendor perceptions, building preference early and throughout the buyer journey is critical. This means dismantling the divide between brand and demand and ensuring that the clarity of messaging permeates the full buying network.
- Drive an accountability reset to advance client objectives.GTM teams face growing pressure to prove business impact in AI-enabled buying environments. Since most teams still rely on buyer engagement metrics, B2B firms should codify a return on objective (ROO) approach that ties metrics more directly to customer goals.
- Calibrate the work of humans and AI to amplify the value of both.Humans remain GTM’s most valuable asset, even as roles evolve through AI augmentation, cocreation, and simulation. To ensure that AI amplifies rather than replaces human impact, onboard AI agents as roles, not tools, and shift focus from automation to outcomes.
Frankland said now is the time for “B2B leaders to rethink how they establish trust and build relationships with their prospects, clients, and beyond.”
