The evolution of sales and marketing: A new phase in sales, marketing, and customer service is here

Just as the shared experiences of human beings have changed over millennia, so have customer expectations of brands and buying interactions. Over centuries and decades customer expectations, needs, and challenges have adapted along with emerging technologies, politics, trade, competition, education, and a myriad of other factors that have shaped the world.

In recent history, we have seen ostensibly more dramatic changes in customer expectations primarily driven by technological advances, including the advent of the Internet, eCommerce, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), etc. and ultimately an exponentially greater access to decision-making information. In turn, Go-to-Market (GTM) functions have had to evolve how and where they communicate and deliver value to their customers. We call this the evolution of GTM.

As recently as the mid 1990’s customers, the gold standard expectation was for GTM organizations to provide in-depth information about the features, functionality, and benefits of their products. GTM teams focused on developing and delivering specific, product-centric value propositions. With the advent of the internet and the proliferation of personal computers, customers becoming increasingly product-savvy, shifted the role of the GTM organization quickly. Low-cost providers began entering the market in waves, and products became commoditized. In this new environment, GTM organizations were forced to rethink how to deliver customer value.

The best GTM organizations discovered that the new key was to focus on the problems that their customers were facing, rather than the products that they sold.

This shift allowed a new kind of dialogue between customer and seller in which the best GTM players learned to communicate and deliver problem-specific value propositions. In the 2000’s, a shift to solution selling also became commoditized, and once again GTM organizations struggled to communicate and deliver differentiated value and maintain market-share.