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I'm Sangram Vajre. I've built two $200M+ companies, written three books on go-to-market, and designed a GTM operating system that over 3,000 companies operate on today. If I've learned anything, it's this: go-to-market is the business. Keep it simple, and it scales.
This is Go-To-Market Made Simple. Every episode, you're getting a backstage pass to three things I work on daily: the closed-room conversations I have with CEOs and founders working through real GTM challenges, the systems and frameworks I've built and tested over the last two decades, and the weekly mastermind sessions with our certified partners where we see what's actually working across thousands of companies and industries.
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Sangram here. There are three different views that are happening today this week. Literally looking at
the headlines right now. But there is a one sub headline that nobody's really talking about. So
I'm going to get into that. So number one news that came out today and go to market is this two
X, which is a marketing agency raised over $400 million to build what they're calling it, the
first go to market human agent services company. All right. Mouthful. But the translation is they're
building a go to market operating system. They just don't they can call it because GTM partners,
we have trademarked it and we've been building this for the last five years, but they have a
massive business and massive agency executing on this idea of helping companies build a human
genetic services, which is really the go to market operating system. At the same time, there's
Rackspace who just put out a news. Another one was LinkedIn, but Rackspace just is going to cut 750
people. That's 15% of their workforce to to pivot to AI. Now if you think about that, well, what does
that mean. Is that going to fix it? I'll get into it in a second. And at the same time, I just saw
another news from Harvard Business Review, which published that 83% of B2B leaders say that go to
market strategy is critical, but only 38% say they can actually execute on it. So wait a minute,
what's the problem? There are three different headlines. One is raising money, one is cutting
cost. And the research firms out there are saying that people can execute on it, even though they're
trying to do AI all the time. Well, here's the real issue. Everyone is chasing AI. Everyone, every board,
every CEO, every executive, you included, is looking at AI to solve all of your problems. But AI
layered on a broken go to market motion just makes the broken motion more broken faster.
Rackspace doesn't seem to be struggling because they don't have enough AI. That's really not the
reason why they're laying off so many people. They're struggling because they are deploying AI
on top of a good market system that most likely broken cutting 750 people won't think
magically fix their go to market issue is just going to make the problem cheaper to run. And the
execution gap that Harvard Business Review HBR identified. That's not new. What's new is that the
AI is widening it, exposing it, and compressing the timelines. and therefore what it's creating is
creating new channels, moving faster and go to market. Teams just can't keep up with all these
things. And when you can't keep up, you don't need to pivot. What you need is a diagnosis of what's
wrong. So the big news is that the market is waking up. We have two X raising $400 million to
build this seemingly human centric agent tick, which is translation good market operating system
PE firms are hiring fractional go to market quietly so that they don't need to hire full time
CMOs and crows. And there are five CEOs that reached out to me last week asking if they can
hire go to market fractional leaders from our 100 plus 35 partners that are all over the world.
Companies are winning right now. They aren't the one using the most AI tools. That's not. They may
be talking about it, but that's not what they're doing. They are the ones who got their go to
market system process right. And then they layer on AI on top of it. That's the edge. So if
I were to give you a blunt advice on, well, what is the CEO advice here, what should I think about it
and where should we go. Or here's what I'm gonna say. Don't use AI to think for you. This is what
people do. They use AI to think for you, but rather think how to use AI to build for you. Most
companies, most individuals, most CEOs, most leaders, they are using AI to think for you using AI. Hey,
tell me, what should I do? Tell me where should I go? Tell me what should I cut? Tell me what should
I do all those things instead? The best leaders in the world they're using, they think they're
thinking constantly about, well, how can I use AI to build a business? Make it profitable?
That is the whole point of business. AI was never made. I don't know why people are using it this
way, but AI was never made to just keep cutting cost. AI was made just like internet was launched
to build bigger businesses and better and faster and cheaper and more efficient. So when I see news
like this that are cutting jobs, and then another one where they're raising money, it's obvious one
business is looking at AI to to for efficiency and cutting cost. And over a period of time they
will be history. And another one is raising money to say we need to build, we need to hire, we need
to grow. And they're going to be the one winners at the end of the day. So wherever you are on the
spectrum of AI. Looking at all these three news, here's my big pieces and big point for you as you
as we wrap up, the top news for the week is that growth is not optional. You have to find a way to
grow. AI is not optional. You have to use for efficiency, but what is completely optional
is looking at everything as a problem. That's not the way to do it. You have to create a system. And
I will always love to quote James Clear, because his quote really rings true now more than ever in
his from his book Atomic Habits, is that you don't rise to a level of your goals. No, no one that
everybody has crazy amount of goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Therefore you see a
company closing down or are letting people go. They are falling down to the level of their
system. They don't have one. So they keep falling lower and lower and lower and lower or lower.
Whereas companies that are growing, they're hiring, they're raising money on the companies that are
actually going to start building something. So growth is not optional. What is optional is how
you react to it. So thank you for listening to the news. And if you want to hear more about it, just
follow this channel and let's keep moving.