Eyes Wide Open: GTM in 2024

2023 was a crucible moment for Go-To-Market leaders and founders alike. Sales and marketing teams shifted their mindset to prepare for the new economy with reductions in headcount, runway extensions and a renewed focus on team productivity. Having spent the last few quarters setting the foundation of a disciplined organisation, the consensus amongst Europe’s GTM community is that they’re going into 2024 with their eyes wide open and planning for a year of cautious growth.

Focus on the Fundamentals

Efficiency, paths to profitable growth and reducing burn remain the mantra of good GTM leaders. Whether your product is saving costs, increasing efficiencies or reducing risk, the teams that excel in this environment will show economic buyers business value and ROI immediately. Stakeholders are scrutinising every dollar of investment, approval processes are lengthening and CFO or Board level approval is becoming a prerequisite.?

To build an enduring function in 2024, leaders need to be ruthlessly disciplined on balancing growth with profit. In practice, scaling sustainably means keeping a close eye on multiple capital efficiency metrics, not just one. If businesses are able to focus on these fundamentals of company building, the second half of this year might bear some green shoots of cautious growth.

Optimising Outbound

Reaching the right customers will require surgical precision this year. Where chasing a list of ‘target accounts’ has been sufficient in the past, winning customers in 2024 will demand more sophistication and cohesion. Sales leaders are only interested in net new logo acquisition that offers high adoption, quantifiable value and expansion opportunities in the quarters and years to come.?

This dynamic is particularly acute in Europe as Google starts to clamp down on spam emails from February. Sales, marketing, customer success and sales ops will need to work in concert to nurture warmer leads with deeper intent. Specifically, first line managers will need to teach their teams to qualify customer pain and sell genuine value, marketing teams will need to be targeted and focused on top of funnel leads and partner ecosystems will become more important as lower cost, relationship-led distribution channels.

Churn and Burn

Outside of winning new business, retention and churn are keeping a lot of leaders awake at night. Whilst there is no silver bullet solution, several leaders see 2024 as the year they dial up their expansion efforts into multi-product platform offerings that might deliver incremental revenue streams. Category-defining companies like ServiceNow , Snowflake and MongoDB all started with specific use cases before expanding into larger platform plays that opened the aperture to new workflows and larger, more complex buyers. Broadening the scope of the product suite not only helps with retention but creates new, diversified revenue streams that offer true customer value.?

Evergreen Talent?

As these headwinds persist, so will the war for talent. Whilst hiring volumes are not what they were in 2021, sales teams have to work harder than ever to win, retain and grow customers. 2024 will see increased scrutiny on the quality, not size, of your GTM leadership team. In particular, we foresee that 2024 holds a lot of promise for the rising star underdogs who, whilst less proven, are more adaptable to new market dynamics and still operationally savvy.?

The ability to hire, retain and develop exceptional talent is at the fulcrum of many of the challenges ahead this year. As in 2023, leaders will need to be scrupulous in their hiring plans, often doing more with less and thinking carefully about the chronology of their priority hires before committing to mass expansion (for more on this, see our post about building your GTM for early stage). For the outlier companies that have already built a successful foundation, 2024 may be the year to move upmarket and grow an international presence, but only if they've mastered the basics and are able to justify expansion to their Boards and Founders.

AI Applied

In a world where capital efficiency is the north star of the GTM function, executives will need to find ways to get more out of the talent they have. Advances in the commercialisation of AI, whether for SDR messaging, sales operations reporting or account planning, could revolutionise the way sales and marketing teams work. For technical sellers this comes with the added advantage of upskilling their AI knowledge that could pay dividends in building their product knowledge whilst also accelerating sales cycles. The most valuable application of AI will be those tools that enhance speed and personalisation throughout the sales process: Apollo.io , CloseFactor , Cresta , Gong , Twain and Telescope are some of the Sequoia companies leading this paradigm shift.?

2024 presents an opportunity to build some generational companies and GTM functions. This year will require grit and determination, but unlike previous years, leaders are facing challenges that are now quantifiable and not insurmountable. The legendary GTM teams of 2024 will firstly focus on the fundamentals, maintain clear and bold visions, but will not be afraid to question the status quo, adapt to new contexts and emerge as outliers.?

Thank you to our contributors for sharing their thoughts with us:

Martin Geier (Miro), Chris Moojen (Atlassian), Geraldine MacCarthy (Personio), David Parry-Jones (DeepL), Arun Mani (Pleo), Simon O'Kane (Yokoy), Luke Rogers (Comply Advantage), Christina Kemper (Recorded Future), Kelly Messina (Cole Group), Robbie O'Connor (Notion), Remy A. Lazarovici (Celonis), Andy Price (Artisanal Talent), Philip van der Wilt (Samsara), Alastair Ejeson-Gould (dbt Labs), Brian O'Reilly (Melio), Paul Adams (Watershed), Shane Burgess .