Instead of waxing poetic about the competitive advantage of AI, future-proofing your career, blah blah blah…I’ll tell you the real reason I wanted to dig in deep with an AI-first GTM:
I hate doing stupid, repetitive, menial tasks.
Every job has them. We accept them as a fact of life: death, taxes, mind-numbing tasks at work, next. But unlike death and taxes, I’m convinced that we can minimize (or elimination) menial tasks with AI, automation, and workflow improvements. And in way of a preview, I’m stubbornly going to prove myself right and you can follow along the journey on this Substack.
And here’s the thing, in marketing, our brilliant human intelligence is best applied for creativity, pattern matching in the nuanced language our prospects and customers use, quality judgement, and most importantly, understanding and harnessing affect to influence behavior at scale.
So the key question is: how can artificial intelligence minimize stupid repetitive menial tasks so we can apply human intelligence where it matters?
What is AI-First GTM?#
GTM is a strategic and tactical motion spanning across every external-facing team that dictates each team’s north star goal and behaviors to get there. To be more specific, some components of a GTM include:
Targeting: who are your buyers?
Messaging and positioning: how do you stand out and differentiate in a way your buyers will care about?
GTM motion: product-led growth, sales-led growth, hybrid
Pricing & packaging: what’s the cost of good and services? How will buyers transact with your organization?
Marketing & sales execution: rubber meet road moment of developing your addressable market and selling into them
Marketing campaigns & events: collaterals up the wazoo
Sales outreach cadences, decks, talk tracks
Sales training and enablement
Channel / distributor development
Operations
Competitive intelligence and analysis
Market intelligence and analysis
This is not an exhaustive list. But turns out AI can be applied thoughtfully and effectively to all areas.
An AI-first GTM thus is: a GTM motion that functions with AI interwoven in every aspect of its execution.
Simple right?
I do want to make a distinct here though. AI-first goes beyond AI-enabled which is where I think most marketing teams are at today. We use LLMs to create blogs, video scripts, etc but we haven’t taken the next step of real workflow automation. I think we’re massively underutilizing the potential of AI to transform our workflows and, on a more quotidian level, our work days.
And a note on inspiration where it’s due, I came across this Vanta job posting which articulates characteristics of an AI-first GTM with extreme clarity:
Ok, what’s next?#
I’m exploring this in a “hand-on-keyboard” way as someone with no engineering background. I’ll share my real experiences building an AI-first GTM in my role as a Director of Product Marketing working for a cybersecurity startup — what works, what doesn’t, how to make it work, where the current limitations are, etc.
Let’s do this.