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

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

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

The challenge for founders and operators, though, will be threading the needle. While there has been some chatter of startups hiring developers more versed and loosing them on typical GTM problems, he said, there’s still a need for more specific domain expertise.

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

Alison Wagonfeld, vice president of marketing at Google Cloud, said the craft of marketing is still very much required.

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

Teams that adopt AI, though, can move more quickly “You can just get out there with so many more messages faster, and then you can think more holistically about what metrics am I driving for,” , she added.

Marc Manara, head of startups at OpenAI, has found many startups have embraced AI in their GTM strategy, though it’s not necessarily with the sole focus of minimizing how many resources they put toward it. 

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

Specifically, he said there are tools that help build leads which are much more sophisticated than in the past. Rather than just a simple query of a database, AI prompts can help startups find prospective customers that fit a very specific set of requirements.

Inbound marketing has changed, too, he added, by using the results of those prompts to qualify and score inbound leads “with a lot more precision could have been in the past.”

When it comes time for a startup to begin crafting its go-to-market strategy, Wagonfeld said its important to consider what qualities it might want in a GTM team. 

“It’s a change in hiring perspective, where the past it was more about hiring specialists, people who really knew, sometimes even like a sub-specialty within marketing or within sales. And now it’s hiring for a sense of curiosity and understanding,” she said. “It’s almost the top thing to hire for now.”