The traditional go-to-market playbook is dead.
Sales and marketing teams that once relied on high-volume outreach to hit their numbers are seeing diminishing returns. Minor changes to outdated processes — a bit of automation here, another tech solution there — simply won’t be enough to drive sustained growth in the AI era.
To stand out today, companies must focus on precise targeting and intelligent engagement, aligning their motions to the ways buyers actually make decisions.
The foundation for this change lies in the rapidly growing category of Go-to-Market Intelligence: a fusion of data, signals, and AI that enables marketing and sales teams to work smarter, move faster, and drive revenue growth.
Here’s how to leverage a GTM Intelligence Platform to set your marketing team up for sustained success.
A New Marketing Strategy for B2B
Today, the winning approach is quality over quantity. Instead of chasing every lead that fills out a form, teams should be asking:
- Which accounts truly match our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
- What behavioral or intent signals indicate real buying interest?
- How can we segment our efforts to engage the right prospects at the right moment?
This shift toward precision-driven marketing is what sets apart high-growth companies from those still clinging to outdated, volume-based strategies.
How GTM Intelligence Changes the Marketing Game
GTM Intelligence transforms the way businesses identify, prioritize, and engage buyers. It ensures that marketing and sales teams are not wasting time on accounts that are not ready to buy.
A simple yet powerful methodology is to map out past wins and analyze the digital footprints of those accounts before they entered a buying cycle.
For example, if the average deal cycle is six months, the key questions are:
- What were your best fit customers doing six months before they bought?
- Were they increasing job postings in key departments?
- Were they adopting new technologies?
- Were they consuming specific types of content?
This is the kind of critical information that GTM Intelligence delivers: actionable insights that align sales and marketing efforts with actual buying behavior, not just arbitrary outreach.
3 Practical Steps to Strengthen Your Go-to-Market Motion
For marketing and sales teams looking to optimize their approach, here are three key areas to focus on:
1. Integrate Sales and Marketing into One GTM Team
If marketing, sales development, and sales all have different definitions of success, inefficiency is inevitable.
Take account scoring: it’s meant to ensure departmental alignment, but too often, the presumptions baked into marketing’s complex scoring models wind up causing major friction with sales.
But when sales and marketing are working from a shared set of buying signals, and use the same AI tools to contextualize and activate those signals, they create a level of transparency that brings the entire GTM team together.
Alignment is not enough anymore — true integration is the goal.
2. Prioritize Quality Over Volume
Volume works in SMB markets with short sales cycles, but in enterprise deals, precision matters more. Instead of flooding inboxes with generic outreach, start by focusing on identifying key accounts based on intent and behavioral signals. Then engage these buyers earlier in their journey, before they officially enter a buying cycle. And make sure you’re customizing messaging based on where an account is in their decision-making process.
A rule of thumb I go by: if there is no clear reason to reach out to a prospect, then it is not worth the effort. The right signals indicate when to engage and how to personalize the message, so don’t waste your time, or theirs.
3. Leverage AI to Surface Actionable Insights
AI-powered GTM Intelligence platforms like ZoomInfo provide real-time, dynamic data that CRM systems simply cannot, because a static CRM does not capture the ever-changing buyer journey.
CRMs are where data goes to collect dust. AI-driven platforms, on the other hand, analyze real-time intent signals, job changes, technology adoption, and digital behavior to provide a clearer picture of buying readiness.
Building Your New B2B Go-to-Market Strategy
The most successful B2B marketing teams are not just running campaigns — they are architecting buying journeys.
To get started, teams should map out the customer journey and align GTM efforts accordingly. Document who owns each stage of the journey — from awareness to consideration to decision. Next, look at KPIs across marketing and sales to determine if they are truly aligned. And finally, make sure engagement strategies are optimized based on real behavioral insights.
GTM Intelligence makes all of this not only possible, but easy. It enables B2B teams to orchestrate data-driven, AI-powered strategies that convert more efficiently.
The go-to-market strategy of the future is built on intelligence — understanding buyers, aligning motions to their journey, and leveraging AI and data to engage with precision. Outdated volume-based tactics are no longer effective. The future of B2B marketing belongs to those who operate with intelligence.
The Future of GTM is Here
At ZoomInfo, we are constantly evolving our own GTM strategy based on data, AI, and real buyer behavior. For teams looking to transform their marketing and sales motion, embracing GTM Intelligence is the first step.
Explore what ZoomInfo’s GTM Intelligence platform can do for your company today.