This week marks the end of 2024 and the start of 2025. So what did we learn in 2024 and what are the next big things that will drive GTM excellence this coming year?
Economic uncertainty drove prioritization and doing more with less and became the central theme in 2024. Departments moved to consolidate vendors, measure ROI and analyze the Revenue Data and AI signals that mattered the most. Some of the shine came off of company-level signals as GTM teams looked to find demand signals that are more actionable – intent at the city level not just country, persona signals not just department, product signals to indicate divisions. GenAI for content development became rampant and many organizations, departments and teams deployed multiple tools across multiple channels. But here’s the rub. Most of these efforts were done at the departmental level. Siloed efforts in Sales or Marketing.
How is this possible? Revenue operations or RevOps professionals are all championing joint strategies across sales and marketing, right? But how many revenue ops people are out there? If you search the hundreds of millions of titles in LinkedIn you will see that there are very few companies that have anyone with the title of revenue operations – less than 1 percent of the companies on LinkedIn. So most sales and marketing operations are left to making this happen on their own – in separate departments with separate budgets and often separate goals.
What does this spell? S_I_L_O_S. Data silos. Strategy silos. Budget silos. Performance silos. And what are the companies who are actively breaking down these silos doing?
I’ll share a story about a high tech company in the hardware industry. In this company, both sales and marketing operations report into the COO. The team was tasked to work together to reorganize the sales and marketing investments. They started first by identifying a TAM for every company out there that mattered and rank ordered them for a new sales and marketing coverage model. Once this was done, then all investments in both sales and marketing were tasked with focusing engagement efforts squarely on this prioritized set of accounts, prioritized buying teams and prioritized solution offers. Within a few quarters more than 80% of the inbound lead flow of the company fell within the TAM. This focus meant increased pipeline generation in the right accounts with the right buyers and the right value proposition. This spells F_O_C_U_S. So how will this be tackled in 2025?
Let’s face it. Sales, marketing and SDR teams are in the same company but on separate teams – from the data and tools they use to the targets and goals they have. Alignment is missing across most B2B organizations. We believe it will fall on RevOps or tight coupled sales and marketing ops teams to take the lead in turning Go-to-Market (GTM) efforts across organization into a team sport. CMOs and CROs will be responsible for tearing down the walls between sales and marketing. Why do we believe this? Let’s look at three main predictions we expect to see championed by RevOps in the B2B sales and marketing environment in 2025 to overcome organizational misalignment.
1. GTM data siloes will disappear and aligned TAM targeting will emerge. There will be synchronization across teams, CRM and automation systems.
Eliminating data siloes is critical, as it hinders collaboration, slows decision-making, and limits a company’s ability to gain a comprehensive view of its operations. But it’s only a first step. By building and aligning around a shared TAM, teams can no longer work in isolation. This fosters collaboration, improves analytics accuracy, and ensures that all stakeholders are working with consistent and actionable information on the same plan. In today’s competitive B2B landscape, a streamlined and integrated TAM strategy is essential for driving innovation and maintaining a competitive edge.
And there are other side benefits. By aligning around a shared TAM, teams are able to reduce the number of data vendors and systems making it easier to streamline operations, improve data quality, and lower costs. Managing multiple data vendors and systems often results in redundant services, inconsistencies in data formats, and overlapping datasets and capabilities, which can complicate decision-making processes. Consolidating vendors and tools allows companies to negotiate better pricing, achieve greater alignment with their specific business goals, and ensure standardized data and targeting processes across all departments. Additionally, working with fewer vendors reduces administrative overhead and enhances data governance, enabling teams to focus on leveraging insights rather than troubleshooting discrepancies.
2. GTM teams will become aligned on actionable buying signals. They will agree on what they are and what they mean and prioritized into a shared resource across teams. Individual signals will not be good enough.
After aligning on data, GTM teams must align on buying signals. Especially on the trends of buying signals. Everyone involved in your GTM efforts needs to understand what’s new and agree on the signals that matter. B2B sales and marketing teams need to track changes in buying signals because these shifts offer crucial insights into a prospect’s readiness to engage, their evolving needs, and their position in the buying journey. Buying signals, such as a prospect downloading a whitepaper, attending a webinar, or increasing website visits, indicate interest and intent. However, these signals are not static—changes over time, such as the frequency of interactions or a sudden spike in activity, can highlight when a prospect is actively evaluating solutions or when their priorities have shifted. By monitoring these changes, sales and marketing teams can tailor their outreach strategies, ensuring they engage prospects at the right moment with relevant messaging, which can significantly boost conversion rates.
Tracking changes in buying signals helps identify potential churn or stalled deals in existing customer relationships. For example, a decrease in engagement, such as fewer product logins or canceled meetings, could signal waning interest or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these trends early allows sales and marketing teams to proactively address concerns, strengthen relationships, and prevent lost revenue. In a B2B environment where sales cycles are long and involve multiple stakeholders, these insights provide a competitive advantage, enabling teams to stay one step ahead in building trust and value.
Intent is interesting, but intent at the city level is even more interesting because it’s actionable. That metro-intent with a persona added is way more interesting. Evaluating multiple buying signals together allows for much deeper buyer insights, as it provides a more comprehensive and accurate picture of a prospect’s intent. While individual signals might indicate surface-level interest, combining multiple signals, such as a prospect researching competitor solutions, interacting with pricing pages, and engaging with account-based marketing campaigns, paints a more nuanced view of their intent. This multi-signal approach helps differentiate between casual curiosity and serious intent, allowing teams to prioritize high-value leads and allocate resources more effectively. By triangulating these signals, sales and marketing can better identify prospects that are not only interested but also closer to making a purchasing decision.
Evaluating signals in context helps uncover patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, a surge in activity from multiple stakeholders at the same company could suggest the prospect is nearing a decision and involving key decision-makers. Similarly, when signals align with external factors, such as industry trends or fiscal-year-end purchasing cycles, they become even more reliable predictors of intent. This layered understanding helps B2B teams align their strategies, optimize timing, and personalize their approach, ultimately leading to higher close rates and stronger customer relationships. By leveraging buying signals holistically, sales and marketing teams can move beyond reactive strategies to predictive, data-driven engagement.
3. GTM Team tools will emerge. They will have an emphasis on making it truly agile and easy for sales, marketing and SDRs to align and target buyers and buying teams throughout the buying journey. This will aggressively shorten the time to engagement and opportunities by having the data, signals and activation tools they need at their fingertips.
Picture the field teams everywhere who are aligning sales, SDR and marketing resources to create demand at a local level. Today they use separate tools, separate content and separate target lists. By aligning targeting, buying signals and value propositions engagement can be orchestrated across communications channels and buying teams.
A team tool fosters transparency and accountability across teams. When marketing, SDRs, and sales share the same strategy, they can track progress against common metrics, identify bottlenecks in the pipeline, and measure the ROI of specific campaigns or strategies. This shared visibility minimizes finger-pointing and promotes a collaborative culture where teams work together to resolve issues and achieve shared objectives. With clear, consistent targeting/signals, each team can confidently contribute to the broader revenue strategy, knowing their efforts are informed by the same source of truth.
To sum all up, focus will be the theme for 2025. Consistent targeting against a shared TAM will mean that sales, marketing and SDR teams are all going after the same companies/buyers. Consistent and actionable buying signals will help teams to jump on the right opportunities at the right companies and buying centers. And finally team tools will make all of this orchestration into a natural, agile process – a focused team sport. Stay tuned for some big changes happening at Leadspace as they will relate to aligning your teams’ focus effectively. Here’s to a monumental start to 2025, cheers!
