The Revenue Orchestration Category

GTMfund's view and thesis on the category

May 31, 2024

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Covered today:

GTMfund’s view and thesis on the revenue orchestration category.
More on GTM for your eardrums.
More on GTM for your eyeballs.
Startups to watch.
Hottest GTM jobs of the week.
GTM industry events.

For the last seven years I have had a front row seat across Sales Hacker, Outreach and now, GTMfund on the explosion and evolution of the revenue technology category - now referred to as revenue orchestration.

At GTMfund, having a comprehensive understanding of the category is essential. We need to make sure we are investing in the best B2B SaaS companies.

With that overall vantage point, we get asked about the category all the time from people trying to figure out where to spend, where to invest and where we might be going.

Here’s a breakdown of our view and thesis on the category - let’s get into it.

The revenue orchestration category

How did we get here

The TL;DR:

Incumbents went horizontal, leaving the buyer starving for innovation.
There was a false start in new AI native entrants.
The consolidation battle will begin again soon.

Where there is opportunity

It’s a busy landscape. Marketing technology alone has over 14,000 companies (source).

Despite this, there is always room for new companies to emerge.

However, in order to be successful in the current climate, companies need to be building two steps ahead.

With the rate of evolution in technology, companies can’t build for the past or even the current - they need to build for the future go-to-market motions and needs.

Our thesis:

There's always room for innovation, not all of the value will flow to the larger players.
Where the opportunity is: new entrants have the opportunity to re-write the GTM playbook of the future and attack it using first principles thinking.
The competitive advantage will be changing the playing field, not just building tools that allow us to do the ‘predictable revenue’ model faster and cheaper. You need to spend just as much time thinking about what the new model will look like as you do building (or buying) tech.
We need to fall in love with our buyers again and meet them where they are. They don’t care about minor feature differences and whether or not you’re using AI. How does it make their lives easier to do business with you?

The 5 themes GTMfund is looking at

There are five broad themes we are focused on:

Ecosystem-led growth.
Signal-based sales.
Reducing churn/getting closer to the customer.
Social proof/peer-to-peer selling.
Turning sellers into growth engineers.

The thesis:

The incumbents, for the most part, were not built natively to support these motions.
Many of these new AI native platforms don’t have any proprietary data that they own, they are relying on actions taken in other platforms to teach their LLM/AI models or 100% reliant on an outside model (risk, low margin).
There will be a graveyard of revenue orchestration companies over the next 5 years who fell in love with a technology rather than a solution to a problem/jobs to be done.
Whoever owns the actions = owns the data = can build the smartest LLM. Look for ways to have people take more and more unique actions on your platform.

Examples of companies we are investing in across these 5 themes:

Ecosystem-led growth - platforms like Crossbeam and Cabal.
Signal-based sales - platforms like Pocus.
Reducing churn/getting closer to the customer - platforms like Arrows.
Social proof/peer-to-peer selling - platforms like Noble.
Turning sellers into growth engineers - platforms like Operator.ai.

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👂 More for your eardrums:

Subscribe to The GTM Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

GTM 96: The Three Pillars of a Modern Go-To-Market Strategy Every Revenue Leader Should Know with Kelly Hopping:

Kelly Hopping is currently the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Demandbase where she is responsible for differentiating the go-to-market platform, increasing brand presence, and accelerating acquisition and conversion of potential customers.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts by searching “The GTM Podcast.”

👀 More for your eyeballs:

The new outbound playbook, outlined by sales expert operator Florin Tatulea.

What we’re reading:

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail - by Ray Dalio (my pick).
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness - by Morgan Housel (Paul Irving’s pick).

🚀 Startups to watch:

13 startups shared the stories behind how co-founders met last week.

UserEvidence launched Research Content, a full-service offering that turns market research into original thought leadership content. This product launch enables B2B marketing teams to create original research thought-leadership / market-research long-form reports with survey panels at a fraction of the cost of analyst firms or agencies.

🔥 Hottest GTM jobs of the week:

Head of Revenue Operations at Armada (Remote - US)
SMB, Business Development Representative at Capchase (London)
SMB, Account Executive at Capchase (London)
Manager, Customer Success at Vanta (Remote - US)
Entrepreneur in Residence - Growth at Clarisights (Berlin)

See more top GTM jobs on the GTMfund Job Board.

🗓️ GTM industry events

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

[June 4-5] SaaStr Europa (SaaStr): a full 2-day with 75+ tactical sessions from world-known founders, new voices, and up & comers in SaaS.
[June 4] Happy Customers Festival (Virtual): a free virtual event that demonstrates how to maximize HubSpot by integrating best-in-class apps. Dive deep into practical strategies that improve GTM activities across the entire customer lifecycle—marketing, sales, and customer success. Don’t miss this event if you’re looking to elevate your team’s performance with HubSpot.
[June 6] CRO Summit by Pavilion (Boston, MA): unlock new perspectives and tactics that can help you take a new approach to growth, understand your unit economics, and align with key stakeholders to elevate your business - and your career.
[September 10-12] SaaStr Annual (SaaStr): 3 full days of tactical content, 100’s of workshops, and 1000s of networking sessions for SaaS founders, executives and others.
[October 14-16] GTM Summit by Pavilion (Austin, TX): a B2B SaaS conference for go-to-market executives. Bring your GTM leadership team to learn, get aligned and get ahead on planning your 2025 strategy.

The next big player in the revenue technology space will not emerge because they have the best technology, as it’s becoming a commodity. Rather, it will dominate because they rewrite the go-to-market playbook and accurately predict/build how we will all buy/sell in the future.

There’s never been a more interesting time to be in go-to-market revenue.

Barker ✌️