How Generative AI will Impact Your GTM Motion (part 1)
The GTM Newsletter
“Google is done.”
“This is an order of magnitude similar to the impact of the creation of the internet.”
Well I guess it’s official, we’ve now entered another hype cycle.
Sorry blockchain - time to step aside.
There’s a new player in town: Generative AI.
Now I imagine you’re probably already sick of reading about Dall-E, GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), ChatGPT and the pending release of GPT-4.
Thanks to breakthroughs by OpenAI and whole lot of Tweets/TikToks - generative AI has gone mainstream.
So do we really need another newsletter on it?
Here’s why I think we do:
Like every new technology, there’s a lot of over-blown hype and hyperbole on “how it’s going to change the world” but not a lot of real world use cases being discussed.
How are people actually using it today? And how will it impact me and my go-to-market motion in the near term?
That’s what I’ve brought in some experts to weigh in on below.
Anyway, let’s get into it.
How Generative AI will Impact Your GTM Motion (Part 1)
Let’s level set with a definition:
“Generative AI refers to unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms that enable computers to use existing content like text, audio and video files, images, and even code to create new possible content. The main idea is to generate completely original artifacts that would look like the real deal.”
I think it’s also important to point out that this isn’t exactly “new”, this technology has been around for awhile now.
You can check out this article from The Guardian that was completely written by AI (GPT-3) all the way back in 2020.
So why all the hype now?
Well, AI does what AI does, so it’s getting a lot better and it’s getting better at a fairly alarming rate.
Plus OpenAI opened up a lot of these models to consumers so anyone can go in and play around with them (which helped with virality).
ChatGPT, for example, just launched on November 30th of this year and within 5 days had surpassed one million users…
For context here’s how long some other products took to cross 1 million users:
Netflix - 41 months
Twitter - 24 months
Facebook - 10 months
Instagram - 2.5 months
👀
Alright, hopefully that got your attention - now let’s talk GTM use-cases.
Daniel Erickson, CEO/Founder of Viable has the first one:
"At Viable, we're uniquely positioned to see how the increased capabilities of large language models (like GPT) are enabling more sophisticated go-to-market strategies, given our core product leverages AI to analyze large swaths of qualitative data to uncover insights at human fidelity. One particularly interesting use case we've seen from our customers makes use of call recordings.
There is a wealth of data that exists within the recordings of virtual meetings but very few companies have the resources required to mine these call transcripts for insights at scale. In particular, we think sales teams will be able to benefit in the near-term by leveraging AI to review their meeting transcripts.
Currently, sales leaders typically share recordings of their most successful calls with the larger team as training material, but make little use of their Zoom recordings in any other quantifiable way. With the advancement of LLMs, we're going to see more companies leverage AI to automatically analyze these transcripts to identify common themes and patterns. This could allow sales teams to quickly and easily gain insights from large amounts of call data, such as identifying the most common customer objections, emerging feature requests, or even the most effective responses from salespeople. GPT-3 can also be trained on a set of calls and then be used to generate a summary of the key points discussed in a given call, or a report on the overall performance of a sales team based on the transcripts.
In the near future, we're hoping to remove the need for a transcript and analyze the audio or video files directly.”
Don’t we already have Gong, Outreach Kaia or Chorus for that?
Sort of.
Obviously, Revenue Intelligence has been around for awhile now but as this technology continues to evolve so will the insights/actions that it will spit out.
With new models/platforms like Viable the evolution of analysis will start to get a few layers deeper (contextual data vs. statistical data).
It’s not a far leap to see that with enough internal data, you could have AI prompt you with the exact email copy you need to respond to your discovery meeting, have it crawl enough successful demos to write up the “perfect” script or ride shotgun with you to help you navigate objections flawlessly.
📈 How to take action:
These models are only as good as the prompts/data you feed them, the more internal data you collect - the more effective these models will be.
If you aren’t already using some form of revenue intelligence, you’re falling behind fast.
Play around with these tools in your personal life and let your creativity come up with your own broader business applications (they seem to be limitless).
The sales function will be impacted but there is so much human-to-human nuance in selling that it might not be as helpful (for now) as it’s being portrayed.
Which bring us to a more obvious use case:
Marketing.
Creativity was supposed to be the last safe haven.
That was what humans were going to hang our hats on.
Turns out, creativity has always just been humans borrowing ideas and thoughts from each other, those ideas/thoughts bouncing around in our heads and coming together to create something “new”.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal” - Pablo Picasso (who never actually said this btw but, who cares, the sentiment remains true).
I like Kevin Chung’s, Host of The Cracking Creativity Podcast, take on this quote:
“Being an artist means learning from those who came before you. Very few things in the art world are truly original.
Artists are always pulling inspiration from each other. We may not copy other artists stroke for stroke, but even if we did, that wouldn't make us great artists.
Great artists are able to pull inspiration from multiple sources. They can adapt and evolve their style to fit the project they are working on in the moment. They aren't stubborn and arrogant. They are always willing to learn from others to become better.
Stop believing your work is completely original. It is a detriment to your work and your craft. It stops you in your tracks and it forces you to be narrow minded.
Evolve with your craft and be willing to steal inspiration and ideas from those around you and those who came before you.”
If we agree the above is true then AI will be the greatest thief (and artist) that this world has ever seen.
The CTO/Co-Founder at Mutiny, Nikhil Matthew, has seen first-hand how AI is already changing the game for marketers:
“We are in an era where AI is being applied in new and novel ways that help professionals in every industry do their jobs more easily.
In GTM, generative AI models like GPT-3 enable marketers to get over creative hurdles, try out different flavors of their copy, and explore alternatives that highlight different messages they want to test.
The platforms using these models that will succeed in the future are those that seamlessly shim into their workflows, leverage proprietary data for higher quality results, and enable deployment and testing.
Mutiny plugs into customer websites to present the audiences with the highest ROI opportunities, automatically generates copy proven to resonate with those audiences, and provides a platform to deploy and test it in just a few clicks.
Our data, analysis, and AI are there to make suggestions that will make marketers faster and more effective at the work they are doing. It’s the combination of all of these elements that pushes the industry forward, automating the legwork and putting the marketer in charge.”
📈 How to take action:
Marketing leaders should lean into these new models and learn them as quickly as possible.
Creativity isn’t going anywhere but it will evolve, there are already marketing agencies selling “AI prompts” to get the algorithm to spit out the best blog post, visuals or videos.
Similar to how “hand-made” goods went up in value once we started manufacturing everything overseas, so will incredible human copy-writing and design. Take it as a challenge to master your craft.
There’s no excuse not to A-B test everything now since you can create multiple variances now in seconds.
Personally, I think the first place we’ll see Generative AI pop up into our daily lives is in basic customer support.
We’ve had chat bots for awhile but up until now it’s been pretty easy to tell that you’re just being run through a fairly rudimentary logic tree (if this - then that logic).
For basic requests, soon it will be almost impossible to tell that you’re interacting with an AI and who really cares if you can get the answers you need faster.
No more waiting on hold with a customer service agent to re-schedule a flight?
No more “press 1” to be re-directing to ‘x’ department with your bank?
I’m in.
Take the reigns, AI.
You had me at “never having to listen to annoying hold music ever again”.
But before we wrap up, let’s have Stephen Farnsworth, GTM Leader at Workato, bring us back to reality a little bit:
“It’s super exciting and could absolutely change the way we sell and go-to-market.
That being said, I could see a bubble forming around this. Seems like anyone can slap a UI on top of this and offer up an accelerated, simpler experience to write some piece of content (blog, email, social post, etc.) or interpret audio (i.e. sales calls).
Meaning developing a new ZoomInfo + Outreach + Gong + Highspot combo could be much faster. My concern is that there will be ton of options…which could be a great thing for consumers from a pricing standpoint.
From a personal investment standpoint, I’ll be looking at this space with one overarching question to the founders - “what makes you uniquely able to solve problem x?”
Product differentiation will be key in actually driving additional value (in the form of revenue) to customers as opposed to simply cost savings via cheaper me-too, slightly newer software.”
📈 How to take action:
Use AI to automate simple, customer support requests for SMB customers.
Be wary of the bubble (it’s already forming).
As a buyer or investor, remain a skeptic and focus on business value rather than the shiny, new thing.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
A very informative blog post on how to generate personalized website headlines using GPT-3:
How GPT-3 will impact SEO and Content Marketing:
Where was this when we were all in school? Interesting Tweet thread on the impact ChatGPT will have on our education system:
👂More for your eardrums:
All this talk about AI has my head spinning. Luckily Dini Mehta, CRO of Lattice, reminds us in this episode of the GTM Podcast that it is (and always will be) about our people. Dini shares her views on people-first GTM leadership, her views on remote work and how to diagnose your stress response as a leader.
I listened to this a16z pod on my way down to SF this week and thought it was super interesting/topical with Karen x Cheng talking about the new Creator Economy (fueled by, you guessed it, AI):
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
🔥Hottest GTM job of the week:
Account Executive - US Market at Pepper Content, more details here.
See more top GTM jobs here.
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Honestly, I probably should have just asked ChatGPT to write this for me.
I guess I know what I’m doing for Part 2…
Thanks for hanging out with me - go enjoy your weekend - and tell all your friends that Skynet is coming.
See you next week.
Barker.
✌️