I have to get a pop-culture reference out of the way immediately. My last name is Cullen, so it’s only fitting to start by saying: you don’t know how long I’ve waited to talk about GTM with you all.

Jokes aside, I’m genuinely excited to dive into the evolution of go-to-market strategy. For those of us in the thick of it, it feels like the ground is constantly shifting beneath our feet. While we can’t predict the exact tech stack or tools of tomorrow, we can see the powerful trends driving the next wave of GTM innovation.

To really understand where we're going, we need to look at where we’ve been, where we are today, and where we’re headed. So, let's take a journey through the past, present, and future of go-to-market.

Where we’ve been: How GTM used to be

Think back about ten years ago – launching a product or a feature was a dramatically different exercise. We didn't even really use the term "go-to-market" the way we do now. I remember hearing someone ask, "Who's heading the GTM strategy?" and thinking, "What is GTM? You mean a product launch?".

Back then, it wasn't a strategy; it was a launch plan. More often than not, this "plan" was just a checklist living on a spreadsheet or in a document, owned almost entirely by product marketing. 

Success was measured by launch-day deliverables: 

  • Did the blog post go live?
  • Did the email nurture campaign go out?
  • Did we inform internal comms?

We weren't building sustainable systems; we were just checking boxes.

But over the last decade, we've seen a steady shift in ownership. Around 2015, GTM was very launch-led and asset-driven, with product marketing at the helm for the most part. Then, sales began to play a much bigger role in the process. 

Soon after, the concept of product-led growth (PLG) exploded onto the scene. We knew about free trials, of course, but we didn't have the formalized PLG model that became everything. Following that, the term "integrated marketing" emerged, which I always found interesting because I just thought about marketing being integrated in general.

This evolution brought us to where we are now: moving toward highly adaptive, non-siloed GTM pod environments. The core themes of this transformation have been a shift from sales-led to product-led, from one-off campaign moments to ongoing motions, and from disconnected tools to connected systems. 

We’ve stopped launching products just because we could and started asking if we should  – avoiding that classic Jurassic Park mistake of being so preoccupied with whether or not we could, we didn't stop to think if we should.

GTM engineering: The simple solution everyone’s making complicated
Let’s talk about what we’ve done to ourselves Here’s the thing about GTM engineering: It was supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, we’ve turned it into this monster that eats budgets, confuses teams, and requires a small army of specialists to keep running. I’ve seen marketing teams spend six
GTM AllianceAnkit K.