Is ChatGPT the Death of the Art of Sales & Marketing for Product-Led B2B Businesses?

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ChatGPT is accelerating the pace of change in sales and marketing for product-led B2B businesses. What do these changes mean to your go-to-market strategy? Can they be used as a strategic advantage to accelerate growth?

Existing Business Buying Cycle Shifts

Business buying cycles were shifting before COVID but WFH accelerated these shifts, particularly where the buying cycles were informal, relationship-based, unstructured or consensus-driven. The coffee machine chat was taken away along with in-person relationship building and informal backchannels where many buying decisions were influenced. The old ways of selling don't work as well as they used to.

Everything-as-a-Service in the cloud is shifting business buying cycles from old-school people-first sales-led top-down centralised buying towards new school digital first product-led bottom-up decentralised buying. Businesses buy somewhere in the middle, but it's a moving target. Increasingly impatient business users will accelerate the shift to decentralised digital first product-led buying cycles.

Accelerating Business Buying Cycle Shifts

Buyers are engaging later and entering buying cycles better informed. 57% of the buying cycle is completed before the buyer engages the market. Vendors have to make sure they are represented in the early evaluation stages to remain relevant and competitive. ChatGPT is excellent at generating or re-purposing content for different contexts.

Increasing time pressure, decreasing attention and fragmenting buying cycles means customers have less time to spend on product evaluation, they increasingly expect products to be 'built for me'. To move your product from easy to sell to easy to buy the value and benefits must be articulated in the specific context of each customer for each use case. ChatGPT will do a great job with the content, to ensure this is not brochureware your product roadmap has to align to serve these customers' needs.

When businesses start using use ChatGPT internally to drive product buying cycles the shift towards digitally informed product-led buying cycles will turn into a flood.

Existing Marketing Channel Shifts

The shift towards engaging through digital channels jumped forward years in a few short months during COVID but an increasing number of businesses competing for attention through a finite number of channels means the quality of engagement is decreasing while costs and competition for attention are increasing.

Attention spans have decreased from 12 to 8 seconds in a few years. We have less time and fewer opportunities to get someone's attention. We have to not only transmit when customers are on receive but have to be more concise and articulate in the value we bring and benefits we offer. ChatGPT can turn your message into customer-centric content and great hooks.

Accelerating Marketing Channel Shifts

ChatGPT means businesses can generate and distribute content more efficiently than ever before but a flood of new content will accelerate the decline of already decreasing quality in digital channel engagements.

Platform Response

ChatGPT will affect the volume and quality of content available, but shifting content patterns will mess with algorithms, user engagement and advertising revenue so platform players will move to counter this. The large platform businesses are not motivated to make ChatGPT a success and tend to be heavy-handed when dealing with threats so will err on the side of caution when content does not look human-generated. Expect erratic content performance as they figure this out.

Pricing Models

A shift towards decentralised product-led buying cycles means innovative low-friction pricing models will increase conversion rates and shorten deal cycles. The downside is that low friction pricing models for customers often have a negative effect on cash flow.

All of the above factors combine to drive the most comprehensive shift in business buying cycles we have ever seen. ChatGPT is an accelerant. Strap in, it's going to get really interesting!

ChatGPT means

• Accelerating shifts in business buying cycles
• Increasing competition for decreasing attention
• Businesses engaging later in buying cycles
• Businesses seeking curated buying experiences (built for me)
• Buying cycle shifts from sales-led towards product led
• Shifting platform algorithms, erratic content performance
• Segment-relevant, easily accessible low friction pricing models
• No matter how easy you make it for customers to engage, it's not easy enough

What Is The Opportunity?

The pace of change is accelerating, the constant is we have to sell the way the customer buys.

As business buying cycles shift your go-to-market strategy and distribution model, arguably the main driver of success for B2B technology businesses will become even more important. The product has to be built to serve the go-to-market strategy at every stage of product development. Products that are built to sell scale faster, products that are built first and then sold afterwards have a long and bumpy scale journey. Slow scale and shifting go-to-market strategies lead to stale code and continuous product rebuild. Your go-to-market strategy and distribution model is the most valuable IP you will create, you can't overinvest. A working model should be in place before you write a line of code.

As buying cycles shift the most relevant marketing metric is an action the customer takes that indicates a pre-existing need and a genuine appetite to solve the problem. Businesses are entering the buying cycle later, you can't create a need in a business, the job of sales and marketing is to connect with a need that already exists. Your Secret Sauce will be getting the people-led high touch/digital-led low touch blend right and creating a low friction pricing model that makes your product easy to buy for every segment and market you serve.

To serve increasingly distracted and demanding customers focus on narrower market segments. Continuously run a multitude of micro-campaigns to find the customer. If you think you are in a niche, go lower.

Time to Value is everything, unstructured, informal decision-making processes will not be able to keep up with the pace and complexity of change. The only way to remain competitive is to align your go-to-market strategy and product roadmap to shifting business buying cycles through data-driven growth models.

ChatGPT represents a significant opportunity for businesses that are able to identify and serve shifting business buying cycles. Startups and scale-ups are ideally positioned to leverage these shifts, while larger businesses will struggle.

ChatGPT means the art of creating sales and marketing strategies will be replaced by the science of data-driven growth models. The rate of scale will increasingly be determined by how quickly you are able to generate and integrate data-driven growth models into your go-to-market strategy.