Farewell, fragmentation: Unifying GTM teams, tools, and data to better know our customers

In the early 1900s, when Henry Ford said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black,” he captured the essence of a go-to-market (GTM) approach driven by limited product availability and high consumer demand. In those days, manufacturers like Ford dictated market dynamics with little regard for customer preferences, confident that their products would sell simply by being available.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is hardly recognizable. Modern go-to-market strategies prioritize personalized engagement to capture buyers –?a stark contrast to Ford's one-size-fits-all approach.?

Now more than ever, revenue growth depends on how well you understand your customer – because if you don’t know who they are, their likes, dislikes, preferences, or pain points, how can you expect to win them over in a crowded, noisy market? But ironically in this age of information, knowing our customers isn’t as simple as it used to be.?

GTM teams are inundated with tools. The martech landscape grew for the 13th year in a row, boasting 27.8% growth year-over-year and a total of 14,106 marketing technology products. While tools can have a positive impact on efficiency and effectiveness, they can also be a detriment, especially when it comes to customer data. When your data is siloed in disparate tools that don’t talk to each other, it’s nearly impossible to put together the fragmented pieces to complete the customer picture. And with only a partial picture, your GTM efforts are operating based on glorified guesses.?

Recently I’ve been hearing about this challenge from multiple sources through various lenses. To name a few: Kieren Flanagan spoke about the marketing revolution, and the new skill set marketers need to learn. Sam Jacobs touched on the importance of bringing revenue teams under one roof in the new go-to-market world. Not to mention the rapidly growing role of AI in marketing –?Neil Patel unpacked this is a recent post, exploring identifying how marketing teams must adapt and adopt. While the angles may vary, the conclusion is clear – we’re on the cusp of a major GTM evolution.

Let me share a quick story about our journey to date.?

How we’re evolving Typeform’s GTM

A little over a year ago, Typeform’s marketing, sales, and customer success were operating independently, with different tools, goals, and metrics. This was contributing to a number of challenges, from conflicting priorities to competing resource requests to disparate data –?all amounting to customer journeys that weren’t as well connected or personalized as they could be.?

At my former companies –?Atlassian, Trello, Shogun –?I experienced the power of aligning GTM teams around a product-led growth motion to focus on attracting, converting, and retaining the high-value ideal customers who use and love your product. So, in partnership with the leadership team, that’s what we decided to do. Over the past ~12 months we’ve been making steady progress toward unifying our teams and tools to create one revenue function, one GTM tech stack, and one ultimate goal anchored on bringing in Typeform’s target customers. In case you missed it, our CEO Joaquim Lecha went into more detail in this article.?

Through this process, we ran into a sticking point –?in order to attract our ideal customer profile (ICP), we needed to be able to know our ICP beyond face value, and also identify the most promising leads as they came in the door. And with data scattered across so many tools, this was challenging. Our research revealed that our customers were struggling with similar challenges. So, we decided to do something about it.?

Solving our challenges (and our customers’) with our product

Recently we released Typeform for Growth, a new suite of capabilities that provide an easier, more engaging way to capture, qualify, and convert leads to drive revenue growth. You can enhance personalization and collect higher quality data via forms with engaging new video capabilities. From there, you can then enrich that data to get deeper insights, and then leverage the automated scoring to identify the most promising opportunities, ensuring all leads get routed to the right destination. What’s more, Typeform integrates with all major CRM and marketing automation systems, so whichever tool you're using, you can put all data in the same place and ensure a smooth flow of information across platforms. It’s a more efficient process for your teams (all this can be completed with Typeform and a handful of integrations), and a better experience for your customers.

What makes me most excited about these new features as a revenue leader is you truly get a complete picture, with fewer tools and less effort. And with this comprehensive understanding, you can better prioritize and engage every lead based on who they are and where they are in the journey, ultimately boosting conversions and driving the efficient growth we’re all after.???

Personalize to capitalize?

I’m incredibly proud that Typeform has been leading the way for the GTM evolution with both our approach and our product, and proud of our team for making it happen. Change is always uncertain, and scary, and never guaranteed to work – this can easily paralyze companies into maintaining the status quo. But I strongly feel now is not the time to let others test the waters while you wait on the shore.

Those that unify their GTM around knowing their customers will be the ones who can better put every lead on a personalized journey, engaging in the right way at the right time – a true competitive advantage when customers won’t settle for black cars.