As businesses prepare for 2025, go-to-market (GTM) strategies are undergoing major shifts driven by new technology, evolving customer demands and increased executive scrutiny. In interviews with hundreds of CEOs and CFOs, many shared strong — and often blunt — opinions on what’s working, what’s failing and what needs to change. This forecast highlights the key trends, challenges and opportunities reshaping GTM strategies for the coming year.
Why CEOs and CFOs demand a new approach to go-to-market
For the past two years or so, I’ve interviewed several hundred Fortune 2000 CEOs and CFOs about how they understand GTM and how they feel and think about their teams and what’s coming. Some were B2C, many were B2B. This may be the largest window into the minds of the F2000 C-suite yet assembled, including the bases for some pretty clear forecasts for 2025 and into 2026.
Many F2000 CEOs and CFOs are not only disappointed and frustrated with their GTM performance since 2022, but they’re also increasingly dissatisfied. A pervasive feature of these executive interviews after the first 15 minutes or so was the shocking levels of profanity and highly derogatory statements made about their GTM teams, including specific leaders. These interviews were all contractually protected from named attribution and disclosure, and I found myself increasingly thankful this was the case. No matter the fact sets, no team needs to hear the specifics.
In these interviews, I encountered insights of remarkable depth and specificity, but I also came across a fair amount of ideas that were simply wrong or misguided. This is not about “taking a side,” as I seem to be accused of doing. It’s about accurately reporting and representing the facts of the situation as best as I can so everyone might be able to have a new conversation about where to go next.
Continuing the current course is a guaranteed revolution of the French and Russian varieties. In contrast, we still can achieve a peaceful transition from where we have been to where we probably need to go.
1. The return of business strategy
Having a robust, regularly updated and well-communicated B2B business strategy will begin to come back fast and hard in the second half of 2025, if not sooner. The fact that 57% of the B2B leaders interviewed had no serious business strategy document to point to is, in many ways, the heart of the problem, particularly when contrasted to 98% of B2C.
If you’re interviewing for a job or considering an investment in Company A, ask to see the business strategy document and understand how it is developed and communicated. Then, request any functional strategy documents that may be available. If you’re given numerous functional strategies, it’s a strong indication that the overall business strategy is either weak or nonexistent.
This leaves departments without a clear framework for their work, hindering their ability to effectively operationalize the business strategy. When they create their own strategies, they very humanly make themselves the most valuable player. This assertion clashes politically with all the other functions that see themselves as the MVP. Alignment? Are you kidding?
Dig deeper: Rethinking fit, growth and go-to-market for the modern startup
2. Getting AI right means unscrewing the sales pitch
There’s a very short, very provocative book titled “What Tech Calls Thinking” by Stanford professor Dr. Adrian Daub. I gave it to many of the leaders I interviewed ahead of the conversations, mainly as a provocative conversation starter. This led to one main direction, which was the best use of AI, not only in GTM but more broadly in a company or organization.
Recently, I shared a research note co-authored with renowned author and Dell AI evangelist Bill Schmarzo, exploring the economic value of generative AI. Summarizing quickly but accurately, we found that while genAI does deliver efficiency gains, they are relatively minor, one-time savings that do not compound nor continue to increase substantially. Instead, the huge upside for genAI was demonstrated in the spiking effectiveness and innovation created by combining AI with teams of already very high performers.
On a bell curve, high-potential teams used AI to achieve substantial, compounding gains with no clear ceiling. Teams in the “big middle” saw moderate improvements in effectiveness and enjoyed similar efficiency gains, though not as pronounced as the top performers. Meanwhile, those at the lower end experienced minimal improvement in effectiveness, with most efficiency gains stemming from role eliminations.
What does this mean in practice? Simply put, it’s all about basic math: while AI can amplify results, it multiplies based on the team’s existing strengths. For example, 8×2 yields 16, and 8×1 yields 8 — but 8×0 still results in 0. In other words, AI is a multiplier of human capacity, capability and commitment. While the technology itself adds value, the real impact depends on the skills and mindsets of the people using it. Pairing AI with weak teams yields minimal gains, often leading to cost-cutting measures. On the other hand, pairing it with strong, capable teams unlocks tremendous advantages and competitive edges.
What does this mean for marketing and GTM teams? The 2025 trend is not about simply doing more for less; it’s about achieving far better results more cost-effectively. The evidence underscores the need for a strong analytics partner who can help model the effectiveness and efficiency gains driven by genAI adoption. Without clear data to back up these improvements, teams will struggle to demonstrate their value to finance and risk missing out on the credit they deserve.
Dig deeper: How to tune your GTM strategies to cope with budgetary headwinds
3. Current B2B GTM thinking is on life support
Current B2B GTM thinking is fading, with executives already planning for its replacement and looking ahead to what’s next. Toward the more mundane end of the scale, 52% of the B2B leaders I spoke with plan to replace their marketing leaders with B2C marketing leaders in 2025-2026.
This is because they clearly see B2C leaders as business leaders who specialize in marketing, not marketers who throw around business terms. B2C has the training, understanding and rigor to control all four Ps (product, pricing, placement and publicity). The normal B2B marketing leader really controls publicity and some placement but often isn’t even remotely capable of running the other two.
In keeping with renewed thinking on business strategy, many B2B business leaders realize that B2B marketing has woefully underinvested in the two bookends that make many B2C programs great — market and customer research and causal analytics.
These two pieces have been largely nonexistent in B2B for 20 years, an absence defended by ideas like “We’re different, the normal rules don’t apply to B2B” and “We are moving so fast research and analytics can’t keep up.” Forgive me, but if you have ever publicly expressed these sentiments, you might want to start correcting the impressions others may have formed of your thinking.
B2B marketers and sales teams love frameworks, and good ones have value. But with major respect to my friend Sangram Vajre, B2B GTM is neither simple nor can it be simplified. GTM frameworks without the causal analytics to test them, customize them and optimize them on an ongoing basis are nothing but guesses and aging snapshots in time.
B2C has known this for over 50 years, yet a perfect storm of inadequate training and inaccurate groupthink, combined with a sort of Stockholm Syndrome effect with founders and VCs, has produced a litany of bad calls and failed marketing. That’s what you call it when more than 92% of startups have failed in the past 16 years or so.
The end of the era of cheap and easy money launched a new wave of C-suite thinking about GTM. In its most immature form, it’s just cut, cut, cut. But this won’t last. In 2025, B2B marketing teams must adopt analytics and processes to enable better planning, forecasting, validation and optimization in response to evolving market conditions. Traditional data visualization is losing ground because siloed data only reflects the past — and the past is not a guide to the future. Instead, the new approach to data is dynamic and relational, functioning like a GPS that provides direction and suggests when and how to reroute in real time.
Dig deeper: Is product-led growth a GTM silver bullet?
4. CMOs who speak finance fluently will prosper
Ultimately, the question isn’t whether marketing is an art or a science — it’s about recognizing that science and math inform creativity, while creativity is validated through science and math.
While creativity may be subjective, science is not; it’s probabilistic, as most of life is, but it offers clear insights into the impact of investments and activities on business objectives.
5. There’s a big factual reset coming on understanding marketing value
Marketing is a creative art, but understanding, forecasting and optimizing its value is pure science. There aren’t a lot of different ways to do it. There’s really only one way to compute the causal impact of something; that’s why causal analytics is a cornerstone of the scientific method.
One change that’s already underway in this area is the increasing role finance, particularly the FP&A team, has in evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of functional investments. Sales and marketing are easy examples, but the reintroduction of the perpetually updated budgetary business case means this kind of accountability is being applied to more and more functions in a company. The indications show this will be pervasive in many companies by the end of 2026.
One of the most sophisticated examples of this new scrutiny is GTM, a large network of causes and effects delivered and experienced at scale. As part of that network, marketing is a nonlinear multiplier of linear areas of business performance, including sales. This means marketing delivers leverage that sales cannot create for itself and that marketing creates a massive amount of it.
What does this look like? In a typical mid-market B2B company with a scaled GTM strategy, marketing makes sales about 8 times more effective and 5 times more efficient.
- Can you forecast the effects of your GTM investments?
- Can you model “what if?” scenarios in your GTM motions?
- Do you understand the external headwinds and tailwinds that help or hurt the effectiveness and efficiency of your GTM investments?
- Do you know how long it will take for a given GTM investment to pay off in your business?
- Do you understand the business effects of a big GTM budget cut and how long it will take to recover from them?
- Do you understand the business effects of a big GTM budget increase and how quickly the business will feel those effects?
- Does your CFO understand that a consistent GTM motion and budget are more effective and efficient than one that changes and vacillates constantly?
These are a few of the changes that are coming in 2025 and 2026.
Dig deeper: How marketing fuels the shift from problem-market fit to product-market fit
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