How Go-to-Market Teams Can Grow With AI, According to HubSpot’s Head of Product
Easy, fast, and unified. We’ve talked to a lot of customers about what they need from their tools to grow, and it always comes back to these three words. So why does go-to-market feel so hard, slow, and disconnected? Two words: legacy CRM.
The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) has existed for decades, and there are more tools than ever for understanding and engaging with customers.
The problem is, legacy CRMs have never fully delivered on the promise of being the source of truth about your customer. They are too hard to use and adopt and, even in the base case scenario, they struggle to capture engagement data about your customer.
We now have many great tools to help fill in the gaps, but they’re disconnected, often creating more work and a worse experience for your team.
AI has the promise to change the way we work and engage with customers, but runs the risk of becoming a disconnected burden. The only way to grow is with a unified customer platform, with AI that has access to your customer data and powers your engagement tools. Everything is easy to use with fast time to value, so you can truly grow.
But I want to talk about one of those attributes in particular: easy.
Today, the average company switches between 15 separate apps just to manage their customer interactions. Let’s contrast this with the fact that 82% of customers expect immediate problem resolution from brands, while 78% want personalized interactions. When it’s hard to even manage the tools you’re using to interact with customers, it’s even harder to meet their expectations.
This is where AI comes in. It’s not just the topic du jour, we’re already seeing real value from customers when their AI is easy to use. Early adopters of our AI features are not just accelerating their productivity, but their growth.
Our customer Sandler used our AI tools for creating content and personalizing outreach. They cut their sales cycles by half — from 90 days to between 30 to 45 days. Another customer in the manufacturing space, Aerotech, is now winning one in every four deals because they use our AI to qualify leads and guide seller actions.
We want to make it easy for everyone to grow with AI, which is why we recently launched Breeze, our AI that powers the entire customer platform. We’ve made it easier than ever to use AI everywhere you work, and to get value fast.
4 Ways AI Can Help Teams’ Go-to-Market Strategies
Most GTM teams have spent 2024 trying to fit AI into their strategies. When AI is a breeze, it’s easy to implement and teams can see value fast. Here are my four tips for using AI in your GTM:
1. Start with Data Enrichment
Who it helps: Marketing, Sales, RevOps, Customer Service, Customer Success
How It Improves the Strategy
Your AI is only as good as the data that powers it. The problem is, data about your customers is all over the place. It’s scattered across the internet like puzzle pieces, and unless you can put it all together, you aren’t getting the full picture.
While the data in your CRM that captures your interactions with customers is great, just this data alone is no longer enough. You need to know what signals your customers are giving you based on their behavior on the internet, and you need to have a unified view of that behavior in your CRM.
Now, with Breeze Intelligence, you can get the most unified view of your customer yet. Breeze Intelligence includes a data set of over 200 million company profiles and buyer intent signals, and unifies that with data you have in your Smart CRM.
This complete customer picture just became the context that feeds Breeze, and your AI tools are now working with the most holistic and up-to-date information on your customers.
2. Analyze Customer Signals
Who it helps: Marketing, Sales
How It Improves the Strategy
As a sales rep, you want to spend your time talking to prospects who are most likely to close a deal. AI can analyze buyer intent signals like viewing a pricing page. Automated lead scoring helps sales reps understand who to focus on.
Lead scoring isn’t just for sales. AI can take dozens of data points about your lead’s behavior — what I like to call their digital body language — to assign them an engagement score and a fit score. With these signals, you can send segmented marketing content to nudge prospects to buy, re-engage, or buy again.
3. Create and Remix Content at Scale
Who it helps: Marketing
How It Improves the Strategy
Marketers tell us that finding ideas for new content is the number one challenge they face. Not anymore. AI tools can brainstorm, write, and illustrate relevant content. They can even create videos.
Embedding AI into your content strategy is more than just a volume play. It helps you reach different audiences.
Ask five customers for their favorite marketing channel, and you’ll get five different answers. AI can remix and reformat content for every channel where your customers spend time. You can turn a single video into a full AI campaign with clips, ads, audio for podcasts, and social posts.
The marketing strategies that got you where you are won’t get you where you’re going. Producing more of the same posts or videos isn’t the end goal. AI-assisted content means you can adapt and react quickly to whatever comes next.
4. Put Agents to Work
Who it helps: The entire Go-To-Market and your Customers
How It Improves the Strategy
Nowhere is the promise of AI as great as Agents. Simply put, Agents are software that uses AI and tools to accomplish goals with multiple steps. They work for your business. You can think of it like automation 2.0, but instead of configuring a workflow, you simply ask the agent to do a task for you and it completes it from start to finish.
We just launched four new agents in Breeze: Content Agent, Social Media Agent, Prospecting Agent, and Customer Agent. Businesses can use these Agents to transform their growth. For example:
Content Agent generates blogs, landing pages, podcasts, and case studies.
Social Agent analyzes social performance, company details, audience, industry, and best practices to create social media content for multiple channels.
Prospecting Agent engages leads by researching them, personalizing communication, and automating the outreach process.
Customer Agent is the 24/7 service team member that responds directly to customer inquiries.
With these team members at the ready to help you automate the mundane work, you will free up time for the critical human touch in the most strategic areas of your GTM — and your growth will skyrocket.
How HubSpot Can Help
So, let’s return to our three essential growth ingredients: easy, fast, and unified. That’s where HubSpot comes in.
Instead of disconnected tools, we give you a total customer platform. Every feature is easy to use and works together, including over 1,700 apps in our ecosystem. We deliver value fast, so you can see results in days, not months.
Finally, we obsess over unifying the customer platform. Everything works in harmony together, and you always get a complete customer picture.
Whether you’re a marketer, a sales rep, or a customer success leader, remember this: You hold the key to growth in your business.
The only way to grow is with a platform that’s easy, fast, and unified. Period. We’re as obsessed with your growth as you are, and that’s why we promise to keep prioritizing these three things.