GTM STRATEGY

The pre-2025 GTM playbook is failing

The first line on our homepage says it plainly: GTM strategies pre 2025 are limiting. We put it there because we hear some version of it on almost every first call. The forecast keeps slipping. Outbound is busy and the calendar is empty. The board wants growth and lower spend in the same quarter.

The pre-2025 playbook was simple. Hire more reps. Buy a tool for every gap. Send more email. Fund growth now and fix efficiency later. For years that worked well enough, because money was cheap and buyers would take the meeting.

Both of those changed. Below is what we’re seeing across the companies we work with, the public data behind it, and what we’d do about it.

Buyers stopped waiting for your rep

In August and September 2025, Gartner surveyed 646 B2B buyers. 67% said they prefer a buying experience with no sales rep at all, and 45% said they used AI during a recent purchase. In Gartner’s survey of 632 buyers a year earlier, the rep-free number was 61%.

So the buyer shows up later and already knows the category. Many have already asked an AI to help them compare vendors. The first discovery call isn’t discovery anymore.

The group signing off is big, too. Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2026 puts the typical buying decision at 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers. Its 2024 study found 86% of B2B purchases stall at some point. More people and more research mean more places for a deal to sit still. Once a deal is in the pipeline, every stall shows up in somebody’s forecast as a slipped close date.

Outbound got harder to scale

The old answer to a pipeline gap was volume: more SDRs and more sends. That math broke.

In February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo started enforcing stricter rules for bulk senders. For Gmail, that means anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail accounts. Bulk senders now need SPF, DKIM and DMARC, one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail (required since June 2024), and a spam complaint rate under 0.3%. Blast-style sending has far less room than it used to.

Buyers aren’t forgiving either. Gartner found 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Across billions of cold emails sent through its platform in 2025, Instantly measured an average reply rate of 3.43%.

You can see it in quota. Ebsta’s 2026 benchmark report, built on 316 companies and $78 billion of pipeline, found 78.3% of sellers missed quota. ICONIQ’s 2026 survey of 150+ GTM leaders paints a better picture, with 62% of AEs hitting quota, and 67% where AI is fully embedded in GTM. The datasets differ, but both say a lot of reps are still missing. When that happens, we look at the pipeline before we look at the reps. In our experience, the gap usually opened months before the quarter did.

Efficiency now counts as much as growth

Growth at any cost ended, and no single rule replaced it. Most boards we work with want both at once: hit the number, and spend less to hit it.

The data points the same way. ICONIQ’s State of Software 2025 found the Rule of 40 has become the most reliable predictor of public software valuations. Per SaaStr’s summary of that report, median ARR per employee rose from $182K to $237K over five years while operating cost per employee stayed roughly flat. Output per head is what gets rewarded now.

Marketing budgets show the same squeeze. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders, mostly at companies above $1 billion in revenue, found budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, barely up from 7.7% in 2025. 56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy.

Your buyers are living through the same squeeze. In our experience, a purchase now needs to show the cost it removes before a CFO will sign it. We think that’s a big part of why deals stall late, long after the champion said yes.

Every new tool has to replace an old one

The other half of the old playbook was buying your way out of problems. A tool for intent, one for sequencing, one for call recording, one for forecasting. Now teams are asking what they actually use.

Gartner’s martech surveys found marketers used 58% of their stack’s capabilities in 2020, 42% in 2022 and just 33% in 2023. ADAPT’s CIO Edge research, cited by SAP, found 68% of technology leaders plan to consolidate vendors, with many targeting a 20% cut in vendor count.

The app count hasn’t fallen yet. Zylo’s data shows the average company went from 275 applications in 2024 to 305 in 2025 as AI tools landed on top of everything else, and its 2026 SaaS Management Index has portfolios holding at 305 while SaaS spend rose 8%. That’s why scrutiny is rising. We see it on both sides of the table. Our clients are cutting tools, and their buyers ask whether a new product lets them switch something off. If your pitch adds a line to the stack without removing one, plan for a longer cycle.

AI and smaller teams changed the org chart

ICONIQ’s 2025 GTM report found roughly 70% of companies had at least moderate AI adoption in their GTM workflows, with lead generation and meeting transcription among the top uses. Its 2026 report found high AI adopters run leaner GTM teams at every revenue band. Some AI-native companies scaled on teams that would have looked impossibly small five years ago. Per SaaStr’s summary of ICONIQ’s data, Cursor hit $100M ARR in about a year with roughly 19 employees.

For a Seed to Series C company, that rewrites the hiring plan. In our work, the research and list building an SDR team used to do is moving to agents and tools like Clay, and a lot of RevOps work is following. What’s left is judgment: knowing which accounts to chase and which deals are real. A small team that inspects its pipeline well can outsell a bigger team that’s guessing.

What the transition looks like

The new playbook has to come from your own data. Here’s how we approach it with clients:

Start with your numbers. Pull the last 12 months of open and closed deals from Salesforce or HubSpot before anyone writes a strategy. Your closed-won history tells you what a real deal looks like at your company.
Inspect every open deal on evidence. We run each one through TRAP, our framework of 16 checks across Timeline, Realism, Activity and People (gtmadvisors.com/trap). It shows which deals are moving and which ones belong out of the forecast.
Look at the whole journey. Revenue leaks at every handoff, from marketing to business development to sales to implementation to customer success. Find the real constraint, which isn’t always the loudest one.
Cut before you add. Clear out the dead deals and the tools nobody uses. Then put the freed time and budget where your data says it pays back.

For most teams, the first win comes from spending less on what isn’t working. Growth usually follows once the pipeline is honest.

Where to start

If your forecast keeps slipping or outbound has gone quiet, start with one call. We’ll look at where your pipeline stands and tell you whether a full diagnostic makes sense. If it doesn’t, we’ll say so.

Book the call at gtmadvisors.com.

Ryan Cahill and Seth Cahill, co-founders of GTM Advisors