Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Some growth lessons expire. Others stand the test of time.

Jeff Perry, Chief Revenue Officer at Carta for more than six years, proves it. After helping Oracle absorb Sun Microsystems in a $7.4B acquisition and later scaling Carta’s revenue from $20M to $450M, Jeff has seen every kind of market cycle, product pivot, and team evolution.

From that, he’s learned that the best growth strategies aren’t new. They’re timeless.

This edition breaks down 8 timeless principles every founder, CRO, and sales leader can use to build durable growth.

Recommendations

ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th.

The future of GTM is AI-powered. Join us and thousands of revenue leaders at ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th to explore how high-performing teams are leveraging Go-to-Market Intelligence and AI to fuel their GTM strategies that help top teams crush their revenue goals. You’ll hear from industry experts, connect with peers, and learn about the latest AI advancements. Beyond insights, you’ll walk away with proven AI tactics that you can directly implement for your GTM team.

Save Your Spot – see you (virtually) there!

1. Don’t be the hero, be the quarterback

Top sellers (and CROs) aren’t trying to win alone. They orchestrate deals, bringing in execs, solution engineers, and cross-functional allies.

Quarterbacking isn’t optional if you want scalable, repeatable revenue. Great reps know when to lead, and when to pass.

2. Diagnose before you design

Jeff didn’t try to copy Oracle or DocuSign playbooks at Carta. He studied what Carta specifically needed – fixing broken lead routing, segmenting sellers by skill, and rethinking post-sale experience.

Diagnose, then design the solution.

3. Treat performance management as a growth muscle

Two of Carta’s top performers today were nearly let go early in their careers. Instead of ejecting them, leadership focused on diagnosing system problems (like poor lead routing) and doubling down on coaching.

Performance management isn’t about fear, it’s about unlocking potential.

4. Relationships > Automation (now more than ever)

In a world obsessed with AI automation, nothing replaces real relationships.

Every customer interaction is a chance to build trust, deliver value, and create loyalty that no automation can replicate.

5. Invest in technical excellence early

Carta’s move into fund administration and private equity made technical expertise non-negotiable. Standing up a strong solutions engineering function became critical to navigating larger, more complex deals.

Scaling without technical depth leads to slow deals and lost trust.

6. Make onboarding a growth weapon

Carta’s customer onboarding didn’t just reduce churn, it became a flywheel for expansion, referrals, and upsell across PE and VC networks. Flawless implementations earned trust (and more logos).

Think of onboarding as revenue activation.

7. Fix systems before you blame people

Early on, broken lead routing made it seem like top reps were underperforming. It wasn’t a talent issue, it was a structural one. Fixing the system unlocked immediate lift.

Before you replace people, replace bad systems.

8. Design around how customers want to buy, not how you want to sell

At Carta, Jeff’s teams weren’t organized by internal ops logic. They were designed around natural customer buying journeys: corporations, fund admin clients, private equity firms. Sales, marketing, and CS aligned to serve them, not just quota math.

Growth gets easier when your org chart mirrors your customers’ paths.

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More for your eardrums

Harmony Anderson is an entrepreneurial marketing leader with deep expertise in building global GTM strategies at growth startups. She is currently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made for teams. She has also led high-performing teams at Armada, Engine, Outreach, and ThousandEyes.

GTM 143: Why Most AI Messaging Fails and How to Actually Stand Out in a Crowded Market | Harmony Anderson

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Writer – CEO May Habib is making bold moves, recently featured on the cover of Forbes for helping companies save millions in labor costs with AI. The company has opened four new offices and plans to grow the team to 600. Investors call her “the time traveler” and it’s easy to see why.

More for your eyeballs

How AI is rewriting the sales leader playbook. In this inaugural podcast episode, sales leader KD breaks down the impact AI is having on frontline sales management.

Punch above your weight with organic content. Not just self-produced content, we’re seeing more and more companies leaning into influencer and ecosystem strategies for organic reach. Here you have the potential to compete with bigger companies, without the big dollars.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

1. Marketing & Events Associate at GTMfund (Vancouver, CAN) – come join the team behind this newsletter!
2. Product Marketing Manager at Northbeam (Remote – US)
3. Growth Marketing Lead at Mutiny (New York)
4. Senior Director, Acquisition Marketing at Writer (Hybrid)
   1. San Francisco
   2. New York
5. Strategic Venture Capital Partnerships Manager at Vanta (San Francisco – Hybrid)
6. Customer Success Manager at Closinglock (Austin)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

• Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
• Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
• GTMfund AGM: June 5-6, 2025 (NYC, NY)
• GTMfund Dinner: June 11, 2025 (London, UK)
• SaaStr Annual: May 13-15 (San Francisco, CA)
• Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)

Subscribe now

This newsletter was written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi, Max Altschuler, Paul Irving and the GTMnow team (not AI!).

The post Timeless growth principles that scaled $20M to $450M appeared first on GTMnow.

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

In 2024, Sydney Sloan (CMO of G2, former CMO at Salesloft and Drata) noticed something strange. Traffic from search was down 10%. Then 20%. Then 25%.

At first, it looked like a blip. But then came the shift:
LLMs like Gemini started answering questions before users even clicked.

For a company like G2 that is built on ranking in search and capturing intent, this was an existential shift. Since then, it has also become one for most companies and is a common challenge we see.

Go-to-market teams need to rewrite the brand awareness playbook for a world where content marketing, SEO, and PPC all look very different. Here is Sydney’s framework for what no longer works and what to do instead.

Recommendations

ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th.

The future of GTM is AI-powered. Join us and thousands of revenue leaders at ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th to explore how high-performing teams are leveraging Go-to-Market Intelligence and AI to fuel their GTM strategies that help top teams crush their revenue goals. You’ll hear from industry experts, connect with peers, and learn about the latest AI advancements. Beyond insights, you’ll walk away with proven AI tactics that you can directly implement for your GTM team.

Save Your Spot – see you (virtually) there!

1. SEO and PPC are breaking (and most teams are still operating like it’s 2019)

Sydney saw it firsthand at G2 and Drata. Gemini answers started showing up at the top of search results. Click-through rates dropped by 25%. Even well-optimized SEO programs (like HubSpot’s) saw traffic fall by as much as 70%.

Why? Google’s UI has changed. Sponsored results are pushed below the fold. Organic results are buried. The “answer box” is the only thing that matters.

Writing content just to rank doesn’t work like it used to. Instead, start writing to serve personas and jobs to be done.

2. Enter AIO: AI Optimization > Search Optimization

Teams are now strategically feeding LLMs content that gets cited in answer boxes.

These are two tactics that are working:

• Expert-driven listicles: Content written by or attributed to real operators is ranking more often in AI responses.
• Jobs-to-be-done format: Structure content to match what the user is trying to solve, not what you’re trying to sell.

Tool recommendations to help with this from Sydney’s CMO AI Circle:

• GrowthX.ai: LLM-aware content writing, focused on jobs-to-be-done.
• Profound: Tracks brand visibility across LLMs and conversational AI.

3. Don’t sleep on PR. It’s back (and stronger than ever in LLMs)

AI tools are biased toward high-authority domains. Fast Company, Forbes, and Reddit are showing up more in answer summaries (because OpenAI and Google inked content deals with those publishers).

Paid PR is no longer just for logos on your homepage. It’s how you show up in AI-powered search.

4. The rise of B2B influencers — and why you need one (or more) in your corner

Clay is a great example. They paid 50+ influencers to amplify their launch and backed it up with product. Influencers weren’t just pushing ads; they were part of the narrative.

Find creators who already have your buyer’s trust. Then partner with them before your launch.

5. Founder-led distribution still wins, but only if you commit

LinkedIn’s algorithm is noisier than ever. Sydney’s tactical tips for founder-led GTM:

• Post 2x/week: Anything less and the algorithm ghosts you.
• Comment within 15 minutes: Signals engagement and boosts reach.
• Batch posts: Block 30 min and write 5–10 at once.
• Schedule ahead: Use LinkedIn’s native scheduling tool.
• Test long-form: LinkedIn still boosts posts on its own blogging platform.

6. YouTube and Reddit are the new GTM edge

With Google indexing YouTube videos for AI responses and Reddit signing licensing deals with Google, both platforms are becoming essential brand surfaces.

• YouTube: Expect a resurgence as brands prioritize LLM visibility.
• Reddit: Highly relevant, cost-effective retargeting. If you serve a technical audience, it’s a no-brainer.

These aren’t fringe channels anymore. They’re part of the new organic stack.

7. Personalization isn’t just segmentation, it’s showing up

Sydney’s favorite outreach trick is old-school: try the product, find what’s broken, and send helpful feedback. It works because it’s real and builds trust.

Combine this with referral programs (e.g., $1,000 for a meeting or opp) and you unlock distribution that paid ads can’t match.

TL;DR – The New Brand Awareness Playbook

• AIO is the new SEO. Clicks are down 25%+ due to LLMs. Write for jobs, not keywords.
• PR is back. Forbes, Fast Company, and Reddit are now signal boosters for AI.
• Invest in B2B influencers. Be intentional and engage early.
• Founders need to get on LinkedIn. Or, whichever platform the audience lives on. Post twice a week, comment early, batch-create.
• YouTube + Reddit are GTM gold. They’re being indexed and converting.
• Hyper-personal outreach still wins. Act like a customer. Record what’s broken. That gets attention.

Questions to ask yourself / your team

Ask these questions:

• Are we writing for search engines or problems our buyer actually has?
• Do we know where our content ranks in Gemini or ChatGPT responses?
• What’s one piece of founder content we can publish this week that adds value?
• Could we redirect $5K of PPC spend into creator partnerships or strategic PR?
• Are we tracking brand mentions across Reddit, YouTube, and LLMs?

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More for your eardrums

Udi Ledergor is an iconic marketing leader and served as CMO during Gong’s rise from new SaaS startup to industry dominance. He helped Gong go from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue, while achieving a multi-billion-dollar valuation. His book Courageous Marketing is officially out and you can buy it in the show notes.

GTM 142: Why Most B2B Marketing Fails (And How to Fix It) with Udi Ledergor

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Writer – CEO May Habib is making bold moves, recently featured on the cover of Forbes for helping companies save millions in labor costs with AI. The company has opened four new offices and plans to grow the team to 600. Investors call her “the time traveler” and it’s easy to see why.

More for your eyeballs

The future of AI, startups, and what’s coming in 2025. An exclusive fireside conversation with the GP of Foundation Capital, Joanne Chen. She breaks down why vertical AI solutions are gaining traction over horizontal applications, how to differentiate in an increasingly crowded AI marketed, how value is shifting to the application layer as foundation models become commoditized, and what top AI investors look for in pre-seed and seed rounds.

A conversation about building RevOps teams, leveraging AI in go-to-market strategies, and how executives are finding their next roles. On this episode of Revenue Renegades, Andy Mowat, founder of Whispered and former Carta executive, dives into these topics and his entrepreneurial journey and the philosophy behind Whispered, a platform revolutionizing how executives find unposted roles. He also explores trends in sales and marketing metrics, the evolution of AI tools, and the future of automation in B2B tech stacks.

Customer Marketing Technology Landscape Report. Maps the core subcategories of Customer Marketing and Advocacy platforms, as well as adjacent technology categories that customer marketing leaders must at least be conversant in. In this first-of-its-kind report, you’ll get clear, unbiased data from 200+ real-world practitioners on exactly what these tools do best (and worst) —so you can confidently build a tech stack that works.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

1. Marketing & Events Associate at GTMfund (Vancouver, CAN) – come join the team behind this newsletter!
2. Product Marketing Manager at Northbeam (Remote – US)
3. Sales Manager, SMB at Closinglock (Austin, TX)
4. Group Product Marketing Manager at Vanta (Remote – US)
5. Scale Customer Success Manager at Writer (Hybrid)
   1. San Francisco| Hybrid
   2. New York City | Hybrid
   3. Chicago | Hybrid
   4. Austin | Hybrid

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

• SaaStr Annual: May 13-15 (San Francisco, CA)
• Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
• Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
• GTMfund AGM: June 5-6, 2025 (NYC, NY)
• Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)

Subscribe now

This newsletter was written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi, Max Altschuler, Paul Irving and the GTMnow team (not AI!).

The post The New Rules of Brand Awareness in the AI Era appeared first on GTMnow.

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

Over the years we’ve seen too many startups spin their wheels on SEO – hiring agencies, creating tons of content, building backlinks – only to see… nothing.

So we brought in someone who’s seen it all: Eli Schwartz. He’s helped scale SEO for companies like WordPress, Quora, and Coinbase. Plus, he literally wrote the book on it (check it out here).

Recommendations

ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th.

The future of GTM is AI-powered. Join us and thousands of revenue leaders at ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th to explore how high-performing teams are leveraging Go-to-Market Intelligence and AI to fuel their GTM strategies that help top teams crush their revenue goals. You’ll hear from industry experts, connect with peers, and learn about the latest AI advancements. Beyond insights, you’ll walk away with proven AI tactics that you can directly implement for your GTM team.

Save Your Spot – see you (virtually) there!

How to do SEO right in 2025 (hint: most companies get it wrong)

What high-performing teams do differently with SEO

1. Start with the hardest question: Should we even be doing SEO?

Not every company should invest in SEO. If people aren’t actively searching for what you sell, you’re shouting into the void.

“SEO isn’t mandatory. Just like billboards or paid social, it’s one tool, not the tool. You don’t have to do SEO. You have to understand your users and find them where they are.”

One founder Eli worked with was spending $15K/month on SEO for a QA tool, without realizing that every big customer had come through personal connections. Eli’s advice? Take that same $15K and host more dinners.

Another team building payroll software poured money into SEO. But when digging in, all the traffic came from employee-related searches, not the actual buyers. Right strategy, wrong audience.

2. People are the moat.

SEO isn’t about hacks, it’s about talent. The best outcomes come from teams who deeply understand their users and treat SEO like product development.

“If you don’t understand how buyers evaluate your product, SEO won’t just be ineffective, it might actively mislead you. If you don’t know your buyer’s journey, you don’t have product-market fit. SEO won’t help with that.”

Some companies waste time with generic content and shady backlinks. Others win by embedding SEO into cross-functional teams. At SurveyMonkey, Eli moved from marketing into product and built an internal SEO “team” made up of engineers, writers, and designers. It wasn’t about more blog posts, it was about crafting user-first experiences. That’s when growth took off.

3. Measure SEO like you measure paid channels.

Traffic is a vanity metric. Rankings don’t pay the bills. Great SEO shows up in CAC, leads, pipeline, and revenue.

Everyone talks about SEO’s excellent ROI compared to paid channels, but they rarely quantify their timing, investment, and returns assumptions. When you put real numbers down, the picture becomes much more interesting.

One company was spending $10K/month on SEO… until they asked customers where they came from. Every deal? Referrals. Not a single one from search.

SEO isn’t “free.” Hiring a top-tier SEO lead? ~$120K+. A full program with content, dev, and design? Potentially millions. It only makes sense if the ROI is there.

Eli has a simple rule: if a startup isn’t already running paid marketing, he won’t take them on for SEO. Why? Because without benchmarks, there’s no way to calculate ROI.

4. AI is your copilot, not your enemy.

Google doesn’t care if content is written by a human or a language model. It cares whether users find it helpful.

“Great AI content beats bad human content every time.”

Eli remembers when people tried gaming Google with auto-generated pages using RSS mashups. Didn’t work then, doesn’t work now. But when a client started pairing AI-generated drafts with human editors, and writing for intent not just keywords, results skyrocketed.

5. Want to win? Target the middle of the funnel.

Top-of-funnel content is saturated (and now AI-generated!). Bottom-of-funnel is pay-to-play. But the middle? That’s the goldmine.

Here’s an example:

Eli helped a Latin American e-commerce company move away from fluffy posts like “What is a sink?” and into focused content like “Best compact garage sinks with wide spouts.” Traffic quality improved. So did conversions.

It’s the same principle behind searches like “difference between South Beach and Miami Beach.” That’s a middle-funnel query. It’s not obvious, but it directly impacts a purchase decision, and it’s where SEO still shines.

6. Link building still matters, just not the way you think.

Forget blog comment spam and shady backlinks. The real value is in earned authority: PR, partnerships, and content people actually want to share.

At SurveyMonkey, Eli discovered that the White House had linked to a now-dead page. They revived it, turned it into a landing page, and watched the traffic roll in. That’s the kind of backlink Google respects.

Compare that to a client who had backlinks from domains that used to be massage parlors, now repurposed as “tech blogs.” Yeah… Google sees right through that. And now, so does AI.

7. SEO isn’t dying, it’s evolving.

Google’s algorithm updates and the rise of AI aren’t killing SEO. They’re weeding out garbage and forcing companies to level up.

Take Google’s “site reputation abuse” update – it tanked traffic for publishers like CNN who were ranking for things like “best blender” despite having no authority in kitchen appliances. You can’t fake relevance anymore. You actually have to be useful.

For Coinbase, the real SEO wins came not from more blog posts, but from scalable, search-driven pricing pages. Because that’s what users were looking for.

TL;DR key mental models for SEO:

SEO isn’t mandatory.

Just like billboards or paid search, it’s one tool. Not the tool.

“You don’t have to do SEO, just like you don’t have to buy billboards. You have to understand your users and find them where they are.”

No buyer journey = no SEO opportunity.

If you haven’t nailed PMF or don’t understand how users evaluate your product, SEO won’t help. It’ll just amplify confusion.

“If you don’t know your buyer’s journey, you don’t have product-market fit. SEO won’t help with that.”

Quality > origin.

Doesn’t matter who—or what—wrote it. If it’s helpful, it works.

“AI isn’t the issue, it’s whether the content is actually useful. Great AI content beats bad human content every time.”

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More for your eardrums

What does it take to scale revenue from $20M to $450M – and stay in the CRO seat for over 6 years while doing it? Jeff Perry is a truly iconic revenue leader and the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Carta where he scaled these revenue numbers, responsible for core software revenue across New Business, Upsell, Cross Sell, and Customer Success. Prior to Carta, Jeff led SMB Sales at DocuSign, and started his career at Oracle, where he rose from Strategic Account Manager to VP of Sales over a decade. Read some of the key takeaways from the conversation here.

GTM 141: Timeless Growth Tips From a $7.4B Oracle Exit and Scaling Carta to $450M in Revenue | Jeff Perry

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Writer – CEO May Habib is making bold moves, recently featured on the cover of Forbes for helping companies save millions in labor costs with AI. The company has opened four new offices and plans to grow the team to 600. Investors call her “the time traveler” and it’s easy to see why.

More for your eyeballs

Customer Marketing Technology Landscape Report. Maps the core subcategories of Customer Marketing and Advocacy platforms, as well as adjacent technology categories that customer marketing leaders must at least be conversant in. In this first-of-its-kind report, you’ll get clear, unbiased data from 200+ real-world practitioners on exactly what these tools do best (and worst) —so you can confidently build a tech stack that works.

5 ways to build brand awareness by Sydney Sloan. An exclusive fireside conversation with the CMO of G2 highlighting the new and evergreen strategies to build brand — including AI optimization, strategies for showing up in AI-generated answers, the rise of B2B influencers and the impact of referral programs.

Udi Ledergor’s new book, Courageous Marketing, is a marketing masterclass. You’ll learn how to grab attention, build loyal fans, and craft messaging that truly connects. A little hint on next week’s podcast episode is that you’ll get to hear directly from Udi himself.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

1. Customer Success Manager at Closinglock (Austin)
2. Account Executive at Fastbreak AI (Charlotte)
3. Partner Customer Success Manager at Vanta (Remote – US)
4. Sr. Customer Success Manager at Northbeam (Remote – US)
5. ABM Manager at Document Crunch (Hybrid – Atlanta)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

• Product Marketing Masterclass: April 15, 2025 (San Francisco, CA)
• Pavilion CMO Summit: April 17, 2025 (Atlanta, GA)
• SaaStr Annual: May 13-15 (San Francisco, CA)
• Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
• Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
• GTMfund AGM: June 5-6, 2025 (NYC, NY)
• Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)

Subscribe now

This newsletter was written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi, Max Altschuler, Paul Irving and the GTMnow team (not AI!).

The post How to do SEO right in 2025 (hint: most companies get it wrong) appeared first on GTMnow.

Hello and welcome to The GTM Newsletter by GTMnow – read by 50,000+ to scale their companies and careers. GTMnow shares insight around the go-to-market strategies responsible for explosive company growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind these strategies and companies.

The best companies are building leverage. They’re redesigning their go-to-market architecture from the ground up to scale with systems, not just people.

What’s emerging isn’t just another AI point solution (well, actually, yes – there are many of those!). This goes beyond tools though and refers to the shift behind them. The shift to a new operating model: the GTM AI Operating System.

We’re calling this the rise of the “GTM AI OS” – a coordinated, AI-driven backbone that connects marketing, sales, CS, and product into a single motion.
It’s about working smarter across the entire GTM organization. Embedding AI across workflows to:

• Share context between teams
• Reduce manual work and friction
• Accelerate signal-to-action loops
• Unlock efficiency at scale

Instead of reacting to insights, companies are wiring intelligence directly into their GTM stack, so that actions are triggered in real time, not after the fact.

It’s not about adding more tools. It’s about asking one key question:
“How do we turn our GTM data into coordinated action across the buyer journey?”

The companies that figure this out will build a real, lasting advantage.
Not through more software, but through system design.

In this newsletter:

• The GTM AI Operating System (GTM AI OS): A new architecture emerging across sales, marketing, CS, and product.
• 4 models for building your GTM OS: How top teams are operationalizing AI, from internal tiger teams to hybrid “AI + GTM” roles.

Recommendations

ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th.

The future of GTM is AI-powered. Join us and thousands of revenue leaders at ZoomInfo’s GTM25 virtual conference on May 7th to explore how high-performing teams are leveraging Go-to-Market Intelligence and AI to fuel their GTM strategies that help top teams crush their revenue goals. You’ll hear from industry experts, connect with peers, and learn about the latest AI advancements. Beyond insights, you’ll walk away with proven AI tactics that you can directly implement for your GTM team.

Save Your Spot – see you (virtually) there!

The GTM AI Operating System

The GTM AI Operating System (GTM AI OS) is about building a revenue engine that’s faster, leaner, and smarter. Companies are redesigning their operating models around automation, data orchestration, and system-level thinking to unlock efficiency, reduce manual work, and scale without adding headcount.

There are four primary ways that teams have been building their GTM AI OS systems:

1. Internal operators as system designers

At data-fluent and product-led companies, RevOps teams are often stepping up as the system designers. They’re owning the entire GTM data layer and enabling AI across the stack.

2. Cross-functional tiger teams

Some companies are taking a “two-pizza” team approach to GTM transformation – creating small, cross-functional pods focused on automation and system enablement.

This might include:

• A GTM-aware engineer
• A RevOps or DataOps lead
• A senior revenue stakeholder

3. Hiring someone to build it out internally

The rise of hybrid “AI + GTM” roles is real. Common titles include:

• AI Architect
• GTM Engineer
• AI Workflow Designer
• AI Ops Lead

Here are a few companies actively hiring:

Semrush – GTM Engineer (Sales Ops)

Fleetio – GTM Architect

EarnIn – Senior AI Solutions Engineer

Vanta – Founder in Residence

4. External agencies

Some companies are opting to outsource the first version of their GTM OS.

The winners won’t be the ones with the most AI tools, they’ll be the ones who design the smartest systems and empower the right people to run them.

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More for your eardrums

Ray Smith is the VP of AI Agents at Microsoft. Previously, he was the Global VP of Product for SAP, CRM and Sales Cloud. Before that, he was the CEO and Co-Founder of DataHug, which was acquired by Calidus Cloud in 2016.

Ray breaks down why the rise of AI agents is a tectonic shift, how businesses are already seeing ROI, and what it means for SaaS, team structure, and go-to-market strategies. He also shares real-world use cases from inside Microsoft and partner companies, plus how founders and operators can build or adapt in this new AI-native era.

Get the top takeaways from the conversation, including how incentives need to be reworked to scale enterprise, in this post.

GTM 140: How Microsoft Scaled from $600M to $5B: The Enterprise Playbook with Hayden Stafford

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

Startup to watch

Lindy – announced agent swarms, a huge update to the AI agent creation platform. With agent swarms, Lindy can now “divide and conquer,” creating hundreds of copies of itself — one for each task — and perform them reliably, all at once. You can also check out one of the agents that supports The GTM Podcast in my post here.

Paid – Manny Medina officially launched his new company, a business engine for AI agents, along with €10M raised. This marks the second pre-seed investment into Manny’s companies that GTMfund GP, Max Altschuler, has made – first into Outreach in 2015 and now into Paid in 2025.

OfferFit – has been acquired by Braze. The AI decisioning platform transforms customer interactions with automation and machine learning, now scaling its impact as part of Braze.

More for your eyeballs

OpenAI closes a $40B round at a $300B post-money valuation. This is one of the largest private funding rounds in history, with SoftBank leading.

Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has acquired his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock deal.The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).

Breaking the Mold: The Power of GTMfund’s Operator-Led Model. Scott Barker and Paul Irving share how hands-on expertise gives founders an edge.

The State of Sales & Marketing Alignment Report by Mutiny: Discover how top companies are using personalization to drive higher growth.

Hottest GTM jobs of the week

1. Account Executive at Stotles (London)
2. Revenue Enablement Program Manager at Amper (Hybrid – Chicago)
3. Sales Enablement Manager – Ramp & Onboarding at Writer (Hybrid – New York)
4. Government Account Executive – West at Esper (Remote – CA / AZ / NV / UT / CO)
5. Senior Customer Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Owner (Remote – US)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

If you’re looking to scale your sales and marketing teams with top talent, we couldn’t recommend our partner Pursuit more. We work closely together to be able to provide the top go-to-market talent for companies on a non-retainer basis.

GTM industry events

Upcoming go-to-market events you won’t want to miss:

• Pavilion CMO Summit: April 17, 2025 (Atlanta, GA)
• SaaStr Annual: May 13-15 (San Francisco, CA)
• Web Summit: May 27-30, 2025 (Vancouver, CAN)
• Pavilion CRO Summit: June 3, 2025 (Denver, CO)
• GTMfund AGM: June 5-6, 2025 (NYC)
• Pavilion GTM Summit: September 23-25, 2025 (Washington, DC)

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This newsletter was entirely written and edited by Sophie Buonassisi and Scott Barker (not AI!).

The post The GTM AI Operating System appeared first on GTMnow.