Rethinking GTM in the Age of AI

The playbook we all grew up with in B2B SaaS is breaking.
Social used to be a growth cheat code. Now most buyers assume your brand is lying to them.
AI promises infinite scale. Most teams are just automating bad workflows faster into a wall.

Underneath all of it, two things haven’t changed:

1. Everything in a business is downstream of sales.

2. Nobody buys from people—or companies—they don’t trust.

This post is about what happens when you take those two facts seriously and what that means for GTM, AI workflows, and the next evolution of the SDR role.

From Social Media Darling to Brand Distrust

Lissa’s career started at what she calls “the dawn of social media.” She got pulled into B2B SaaS not because of her Master’s in animal science, but because she had a blog and a Twitter presence.

Back then:

• Companies were excited just to be on Facebook
• Social media felt peer-to-peer; brand accounts felt fresh
• You could build an audience just by showing up consistently

Today we’re in the opposite world:

• People venomously distrust brands online
• Platforms have systemic trust issues (privacy, manipulation, ad saturation)
• On LinkedIn, people prefer to hear from humans, not logos

Key insight:
The biggest shift in GTM isn’t AI. It’s the collapse of trust in channels and brands.

Marketers pushed too hard on tactics, attribution, and growth hacks. Buyers adapted. Now they assume they’re being gamed.

The new reality:

• Brand accounts are table stakes — not differentiation
• Founder and leadership voices matter more than corporate brand voice
• Authenticity is the moat, not polish

Authenticity Is a System, Not a Vibe

Lissa once worked at a multi-billion-dollar company with:

• One LinkedIn page
• One Twitter account
• One Facebook page
• One overwhelmed social media manager

Her $30M and $100M product lines had zero voice or presence.

Her solution: bypass corporate control and use the GM’s personal voice as the GTM engine. Not influencer marketing — necessity.

We’re right back there, just with AI in the mix.

Two truths:

• Founders and execs are the most scalable trusted channel left
• Borrowed, polished, AI-generated voices destroy trust instantly

Apple is a counterexample: consistent, grounded, controlled messaging — not perfect, just authentic enough.

If your GTM isn’t anchored in lived, consistent authenticity from humans, you’re on quicksand.

Everything Is Sales (Even When It’s AI)

“Everything is sales” doesn’t mean everyone should be cold-calling.

It means if your work doesn’t connect back to revenue and customers, you’re solving the wrong problem.

Where companies go wrong:

• Shipping features with no customer signal
• Chasing AI workflows and vanity metrics
• Automating before validating anything manually

Automation isn’t free. Compute is expensive. Engineering time is expensive. Automating garbage just lets you dive faster into a wall.

Manual First, Then Automate

The GTME Lissa mentors is doing zero automation right now. Instead, he’s:

• Interviewing customers
• Mapping buying signals
• Understanding real triggers
• Writing thoughtful, high-intent outreach manually

Tedious. Slow. Powerful.

The alternative is blasting thousands of generic emails, destroying domains, and calling it efficiency.

One path creates compounding insight and trust.
The other creates noise and brand damage.

GTM Engineering Is the Evolution of the SDR

Lissa’s spiciest take:

Go-to-market engineering isn’t RevOps with a cooler title — it’s the natural evolution of the SDR.

Why SDRs:

• First human touch for most prospects
• Real-time feedback from market and AEs
• Deep understanding of what actually converts

RevOps sees data exhaust. SDRs live emotional reality.

Future GTME structure:

• Entry-level: SDRs + light automation
• Mid-level: orchestrating multi-channel workflows
• Senior: designing systems across revenue lifecycle

Prerequisite: frontline customer experience, not spreadsheets.

Sales vs Marketing: Stop the Fake Handoffs

Classic dysfunction:

• Sales says marketing leads are garbage
• Marketing says sales can’t close

Add AI and we get:
“We don’t need SDRs, we have AI agents.”

Reality isn’t ownership — it’s alignment.

One-to-many = marketing
One-to-one = sales
Both operate on the same ICP, same signals, same accounts

Real ABM used to look like:

• Shared account lists
• Coordinated campaigns
• Immediate follow-up
• Joint accountability

That’s GTM maturity. Not more tools.

The Coming AI Plateau & Why Founders Have to Grow Up

Compute is the bottleneck. Cheap experimentation won’t last.
You can’t afford 7,000 low-intent emails a day.
You can’t waste tokens on experiments that don’t touch revenue.

Founders and CEOs are the only ones who can enforce alignment and prioritization.

Scarcity is no longer just GPU. It’s:

• Attention
• Trust
• Operational capacity

You can’t burn any of them.

Actionable Takeaways

1. Start manual, then automate with intent
Interview customers, test messaging, identify signals — automate only what works.

2. Treat SDRs as future GTM architects
Career path: SDR → GTME → GTM Systems Designer.

3. Collapse sales–marketing silos
Shared accounts, shared campaigns, shared definitions.

4. Be ruthless about AI ROI
Kill anything that doesn’t move revenue.

5. Anchor everything in authenticity & trust
If you outsource your voice, you outsource trust.

Pull Quote

“If you take your eye off the ball—which is sales—you lose your customers, your revenue, and your company goes bankrupt. Everything else is just how fast you get there.”