"We need to grow up." I viscerally remember the moment I said this to a group of my peers in the middle of a planning session. Here we were, each of us stumping for one thing or another, trying to build a case for the work we wanted to do. Each of us motivated by whatever priorities we inherited—Sales needs bookings. CX needs retention. Marketing needs pipeline. What we needed was *growth,* and there's more than one way to find revenue lift in an organization. To really succeed, you have to take the long game. Identify your levers, and operationalize around a problem and solution set that's bigger than any one team. Most strategic planning instead ends up being a bunch of functional leaders independently strategizing around poorly-defined challenges that aren't universally agreed upon. That's what you get when you develop a sales strategy, a customer success strategy, and a marketing strategy independently. You're almost always reduced to the service of the most relevant financial target instead of building a coordinated, multi-dimensional approach to pull your longest growth levers. For this and many other reasons, most modern organizations find themselves poorly equipped to succeed in this new go-to-market environment. For years, laboring under the delusion that revenue is at all predictable, we designed our go-to-market organizations and motions around functional disciplines. We hyper-specialized, each layer of granularity owning a smaller, more insular funnel metric. And then, a global pandemic and generative AI later, the technology investment thesis is fundamentally changed and all of the inefficiencies and flaws limitless capital papered over are still here, staring us in the face. In my experience most companies have yet to reckon with this fundamental shift. I find companies typically fall into one of two camps: the technologists and the laggards. The technologists heard "profitable-efficient growth," bought the promise of generative AI, and significantly cut headcount and spend. They're not rule of 40, but neither are they burning cash, and they're flogging a small team of technology-enabled generalists to death automating the hell out of the same old predictable revenue playbook. The Technologists are only marginally better off than the Laggards. The Laggards are the companies that haven't yet reacted to the broader macroeconomic shift. For whatever constellation of reasons, their fortunes aren't as closely tied to revenue growth multiples. They're not making any GTM changes because it hasn't hurt them yet. So they're treading water, running the same old playbooks and holding on through margins, stickiness, or inertia alone. In the end, successful GTM has always been about the *efficient deployment of growth capital,* and "growth" has always done a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Not to put too fine of a point on it, most B2B orgs *aren't growing,* and worse than that, they're out of ideas. My GTM philosophy is as much about removing functional barriers as it is about anything. There is no doubt in my mind at all that the future of this work—be it selling, marketing, operations, success—is integrated. Take a step back, briefly strip away the functional expertise, and I think you'll agree that the most successful growing orgs do three things really well: they have good ideas, they know how to test those ideas, and they know how to scale the ideas that work. If predictable revenue was about "running plays," the sustainable growth era is about "building and iterating playbooks." We've never had more information, better tools and technology, or more connected channels than we do right now. What we lack is a coherent system and structure to operationalize around them. ## The Pillars of Modern Go-To-Market For me, there are three essential pillars of go to market: Strategy, Engineering, and Operations. Each of these pillars is fundamentally concerned with a different question: Why? What? and How? respectively. GTM Strategy is not a marketing strategy, or a sales plan. It's as much about your business model and product roadmap as it is about those things. Your go-to-market strategy is primarily responsible for reification. The GTM strategy group takes abstract things like your business model, your product roadmap, your brand, your ideal customers, and value propositions and makes them real and tangible—internally and externally. The outputs of your go-to-market strategy are things like ICPs, core messaging, brand guides and positioning, pricing and packaging, and content. It's foundational to the business and helps answer "Why do we do what we do?" GTM Engineering is primarily concerned with asking "What might we do?" All things in our GTM strategy being true, what can we try (methods, tactics, messages, channels, tools, etc.) to find traction. This practice of testing and optimization is not a new one, but in the new GTM environment we're seeing how powerful and important it is to organize around this concept. We're living a step-function technological change right now. Every day we wake up to a new tool or tactic promising to solve our pipeline problems. It might, or it might for a little while. But the one constant I've observed across many go-to-market orgs right now is that nothing lasts forever. In fact, the shelf life on a "play" is very short. Granular targeting and new tools give us the power to hyper-personalize, but in turn introduce *a lot* of variables that don't transpose easily. Your GTM Engineering is the tip of the spear, working across customer acquisition and the customer journey to test ideas and help answer "What are we doing that's worth investing in?" GTM Operations is the DNA of your team. How you operate, the tools you use, and the norms and behaviors your team works by. GTM Operations keep the engine running, making sure the tools behave, maintaining data integrity, documenting processes, holding us accountable to the goals. GTM Operations primarily answers, "How do we do it?" Operators are taking strategic and engineering inputs and applying them *at scale* for your team. Sales, Marketing, and RevOps have long held a support role in the predictable revenue playbook, but in our new technology-enabled GTM environment data integrity and compliance is even more the grease to all wheels than it always has been. ## Building on the pillars Functional expertise is still incredibly important. Some people sell, some people copywrite, and some people database design. The challenge of the modern GTM era is to re-think how you organize these roles to best interact with the key functions of growth: strategy, engineering, and operations. These three pillars can and should continually feedback into one-another, and in practice, you will have to operate functionally. The answer for me, is orchestration. We got halfway there with the concept of "revenue" teams and leaders, but we never made it over the line. To really succeed, we need to start organize integrated teams around these functional areas. We need to design our strategies a level up, in a place where our teams strengths have space to breath and we're all clear on the best approach to revenue lift.