GTM Media

Hey #CustomerMarketing, we can help you make customer testimonial videos! Check out this example: https://lnkd.in/ebQfyMr9 Message 🎤 Jorge Soto to learn how we can help! #video #b2b #saas

2025 is shaping up to be a big year for b2b CMOs. Here are six predictions about what we'll see in the year ahead! Caveat: These are just one person's opinion and are likely flawed. Feedback, disagreement, and more are always appreciated in the comments or directly! 1️⃣ CMO as strategic leader CMOs are evolving into strategic leaders who define and attack the market through their two key jobs: building brand and driving revenue. They are shifting from managing a cost center that executes marketing to a strategic revenue driver that helps shape company strategy. 2️⃣ Do more with less Most CMO goals are up, often 20%-30%, after a brutal 2023 and a difficult 2024. However, CMO budgets are flat - or if not exactly flat, flat'ish either up or down. 3️⃣ Tension between brand and demand The CMO's dual jobs, building a brand and driving demand, are often in conflict. Brand teams want creativity, consistency, and control. Demand gen teams want to run quickly and deliver measurable results iteratively, which is often at odds with brand teams' desire for reviews which may slow things down. After two very demand-focused years where brand spending was frequently cut to (or near) zero, many CMOs are increasing brand spend in 2025 in order to make their demand gen efforts more effective. 4️⃣ A year of operationalizing genAI and experimenting with agents CMOs (and everyone else) are having a tough time keeping up with the rapid change in generative AI (genAI). CMOs are seeing that it's relatively easy to get to a 70% wow-inducing demo. To get to 100% and operationalize AI takes much more work. 2025 will be a year of operationalizing, learning, and discovering new use cases. Marketing teams will also explore agentic AI, which is simply genAI that observes its surroundings and then takes action. While venture investment in agents will be high, adoption will rise more rapidly in 2026. 5️⃣ Reducing costs and cognitive load on stretched teams Tech is taking a lot of time, money, and attention from marketing teams (as it is for most teams). In 2025, CMOs are often asking their teams to bias towards tools that can do the work of more-than-one existing tool at the same-or-lower price and still get the job done as well (or almost as well), although this is softening somewhat compared to 2023. Teams are looking for tools that "just work" and fit into existing workflows without surprises. 6️⃣ Hyper-personalization at scale to be more customer centric GenAI is lowering the cost of creating lots of new, personalized content. When paired with predictive AI's ability to deliver the right experiences to each prospect, genAI will help deliver on marketers' forever-goal of "delivering the right message to the right person at the right time" at scale. As a result, CMOs will do a better job of "meeting each prospect where they are" in 2025. How does this resonate for you?

GTM Engineers enable "the new way" of generating pipeline. BUT, they're hard to find, hard to vet, and hard to onboard. I have a solution (maybe—I'm testing a new offer) 👇 Here's the solution that I'd offer: 1. Assessment of if you need a GTM Engineer (not all companies do) 2. I will help you build out the Job Req/Description 3. Tap into my personal network / The Signal (.club) to source high-quality candidates 4. Interview candidates 5. Give them a (paid) project to vet their GTM Eng skills 6. Put candidates in front of you *after* passing the "technical" test Qualifiers: - You believe you need a full-time GTM Engineer (someone who automates workflows and uses technology/AI/Clay to scale your gtm motion) - Series A+ or $1M+ ARR (you already have a few sales reps) If there is demand for this, I will lean into it in Q1 2025. If there is no demand for this, I will... delete this post. 🤣 Comment below if you'd use this service, or tag someone you think could benefit from finding their first GTM Engineer hire. –––––––––––––––––––– I write a weekly newsletter on the future of gtm/tech. Last month, I wrote about The Rise of the GTM Engineer—read it here (and smash that subscribe button while you're there): https://lnkd.in/gCgNZD-B

💡As we go into 2025 reflecting on all aspects of our lives - we as business leaders should think deeply about how we are impacting others around us. As my former colleague, incredible leader, & legendary author Russ Laraway says, When They Win, You Win (check out the book 👉🏾 https://lnkd.in/e8JBncEE). It's really that simple, but definitely takes work & honest caring for others. Every spiritual practice I've ever researched talks about reducing the impact of the ego & focus on yourself. The irony is that by serving, supporting, & enriching the employee experience at your organization - every stakeholder involved in the business, from customers to investors, receives the benefits. I know we have to make tough business decisions at times - but we can absolutely be mindful of how these decisions are thought through & you MUST take into account how they impact the employee experience. At an even deeper level, I'd encourage all of us to look inside & take full accountability for how we show up in our day-to-day energetically, emotionally, & spiritually. We are beholden to our human experience & all the ups & downs that being human entails - however, we can learn to be more aware of our inside states & how it impacts our outside environments & vice versa! That's the journey! - Let us focus on how we can create inspiring, fun, enriching collective experiences that are WIN-WIN for all! #leadership #management #founders #mindfulness #ceo

"SaaS applications ... will collapse in the agent era". So many bangers in this BG2 podcast with Satya Nadella... - The business logic is all going to agents - He's pushing the "sell work, not software" idea - Highlights customer service, finance/ops as hot use cases - Microsoft is trying to "collapse it all", which I think means using agents as a wedge to rethink what the application stack looks like - Infrastructure is not a winner-take-all market I agree with these takes, although these changes usually take longer and are messier than most people realize. BTW, Benioff is saying many of the same things. Worth considering when CEOs of two of the world's biggest SaaS companies are talking about how their industry will be disrupted. If you're thinking about your career (or investing) seems like you want to get long the data layer and agents. And then short the traditional SaaS application layer (although many SaaS cos will successfully transition to agent models).

I recently worked with a founder on an early-stage GTM hire and was reminded of this conversation with Carol Carpenter. Her advice was something many founders need to hear when hiring. Carol is incredible. VP Marketing at Google Cloud, CMO at VMware, CMO at Unity, and before all that, she came in to be the CEO at one of SIERRA Ventures' portcos, ElasticBox, helping it get acquired by Lumen Technologies. Often, we put too much importance on logos on a resume. "Wow, they were VP of Marketing at <insert hypergrowth startup>!" But we need to ask, as Carol pointed out, are they a great jockey or on a great horse? Are they truly great marketing leaders who significantly helped grow that startup, or were they at a hypergrowth startup that would blast off no matter what? Scanning resumes for logos is easy, and we all do it at the top of the funnel. But when it comes down to making the offer, dig deep into what the candidate has done, how they built and tracked their programs, what type of budget they need, do they thrive at doing more with less, when they will hire, and whether they can recruit great talent. Full interview: https://lnkd.in/gZFfjNUA

This is your reminder that there's a wrong way to increase prices. See this email from Spotify 👀 🚫 Unclear subject line 🚫 Unclear how much price is increasing by 🚫 Unclear when it's happening Tis the season for everyone's favorite holiday email: your price is going up. Or, more accurately, "information about your plan" 😭 See: YouTube TV, Hulu, Adobe, Linear, Jira, Loom. Thankfully, there's a right way to do it. Flip the page to the second email from Otter.ai. Why it's so great: 😍 Reminds me *why* they're raising prices — there's been a value increase. Otter had been investing in a better product. I hadn't realized they had features like OtterPilot (awww) or AI Chat. These feature announcements not only soften the blow of a price increase, they make folks curious to give the product another shot. 😍 Uses the price increase as a marketing tactic. I've been a free user. Knowing that I could 'lock in current pricing' if I upgrade now is a powerful motivator for making a buying decision. Bonus points for creating a sense of urgency with the timer graphic and hard deadline. 😍 It's a pricing update, not a pricing increase. This is more psychological than anything. A pricing update feels positive (we like things that get updated, right?) and almost inevitable. Otter's specific choice of language doesn't hide what they're doing, but it does lower the temperature. 😍 Emphasizes the value prop. One-third of the email is devoted to explaining what's included in Otter Pro. While I'd love for these to speak more to the benefits/capabilities rather than the features themselves, it's important to reinforce your value prop when you talk about price. 😍 Gives me a choice. People hate to feel strong-armed with no agency. It's usually better to give folks a choice — even if it's a choice with a clear 'right' answer — than no choice at all. Let's strive to be more like Otter, shall we?

I am excited to announce that Cimulate, Inc. raised $28 million in Series A funding led by Spark Capital with participation from our Seed stage investors SIERRA Ventures and Pillar VC, with additional participation from LFX Venture Partners and Commerce Ventures. Vivek Farias and I started this journey in 2023, and it has been an incredibly fun and rewarding ride. When you see the technology and product, the team, and the market timing all come together in the course of a year, along with a great group of early customers and investors, it is hard not be excited about the road ahead. This is a market Vivek and I know well. Today's commerce ecosystem is at a crossroads, with traditional product discovery technologies obsolete as they fail to satisfy consumer demands and business needs. The Cimulate platform powered by CustomerGPT is the LLM-based solution is ready to change the customer experience, starting with search. I didn’t think I would be back in the commerce search market, but now is definitely the time to be here. Looking forward to an exciting year ahead and hope to see many of you at @NRF next month. Reach out if you are going to be there! (Cimulate is at Booth 1141) Links to more info in the first comment below.

"What's the first thing a new Head of Marketing should do when he joins a company?" Simple. Talk to customers. I do 95% of our customer onboarding calls here at Textla. It's my favorite part of the job and the single most impactful thing I do for us. Why? Our customers tell us all the secrets about how to 10X our business. When I do an onboarding call, I spend as much time asking questions ("How'd you hear about us?" "Why'd you choose us?" "What did you dislike about your prior platform?" etc) and listening to their insights as I do showing them Textla. The insights I get from each call are solid gold. In today's world, where marketers are always tempted to chase the latest GTM trend or adopt the hottest new tool, it's important to stay rooted in first principles and keep doing the things that are timeless. Start talking to your customers every day. And never stop.

Biju Ashokan was named the best of prop-tech entrepreneurs for the second year in a row. Biju is the founder of Radius, an AI-powered real estate solution for high-performing teams and independent brokers. Their mission is to empower teams and independent brokers to achieve more by streamlining their operations, boosting productivity, and delivering exceptional client experiences. #proptech #entrepreneur #founder Brad Inman Tim Guleri