You’ve done everything by the book. Hired the BDRs, invested in marketing automation, expanded customer success, and bought all the right tools. Your GTM engine should be humming. Instead, your pipeline is stalling, churn is creeping up, and CAC keeps climbing.
Buyers complete 70% of their journey before talking to your team. Your marketing campaigns generate leads that sales won’t touch. The customer success team firefights churn instead of driving expansion. The playbooks designed for 2020 don’t work when the buyer’s world has fundamentally changed.
Q4 is when you decide: adapt now or spend 2026 explaining to your board why CAC tripled and revenue didn’t.
Here are the four shifts that determine which path you take.
#1: Hiring 10+ SDRs Is No Longer a Growth Signal
You just closed your Series B, and you are eager to hire a small army of BDRs and watch the pipeline explode. Nice…
Until Q4 comes around and you have to present previous quarters’ performance to Finance, and to the Board.
Most founders and growth leaders (and investors and the Board) approach GTM with black-and-white thinking. They believe hiring more sales reps to blast outreach will bring in net new business. However, this approach typically results in annoying your target market.
Your market’s activity should make more noise than your sales team. This means investing in understanding what your customers are actually talking about. What trends are showing up in your new customer cohort? What pain points brought them to your solution? What problems keep surfacing in Customer Success conversations? Which industry events are they attending?
Securing your next funding round hinges on building a buying experience that meets customers where they are. Simply putting a sales rep with a script in front of them and hoping for the best won’t work. Relying on quick, volume-based outreach tactics is how you waste budget on leads that never convert.
I know this because I’ve lived it. My first BDR role was at a Series C company that scaled too rapidly. Within three months, newly onboarded employees were placed on PIPs or laid off. There weren’t enough inbound leads to go around, and the company had diverted its marketing budget, betting everything on junior BDRs to drive growth.
A best practice would is to start small and be strategic:
- Hire 1-5 BDRs maximum for early-stage startups, plus one BDR manager or Director of Sales
- Invest in full-funnel efforts instead of putting all your budget (and hope) on outbound alone
- As an alternative, consider fractional GTM hires from talent marketplaces like GrowTal who can provide expertise at the right stage without the full-time commitment
- Stop chasing LinkedIn playbook trends that promise rapid success, and be comfortable with trial-error and testing–this will form the playbook you need.
Developing a sustainable go-to-market (GTM) strategy requires patience, ongoing in-depth research into your target market, and a willingness to experiment. This is evident from the journey of a bootstrapped founder I once worked for, who successfully grew his company to acquisition and significantly increased its brand recognition.
Scale at a measured pace. Be comfortable with being the little pony instead of the unicorn—you’ll get there.
#2: AI Is Commoditizing Software Development
AI has made software development faster and cheaper than ever.
Products that once took months to build can now be replicated and shipped in weeks thanks to AI and “vibe coding.”
Software’s competitive advantage used to last about 18 months back in 2017. Today, this looks more like 2 weeks. That’s a 98% collapse in technical durability, and it’s completely upending how B2B SaaS companies need to think about their GTM strategies. Meanwhile, sales cycles keep getting longer, and every software category is drowning in new competitors. G2 is now tracking nearly 19,000 software products across almost 1,200 categories—and they added 14 new categories in just three months.
On top of that, one in four Y Combinator startups this past winter built their entire product with 95% AI-generated code. G2 is now tracking nearly 19,000 software products across almost 1,200 categories—and they added 14 new categories in just three months. Now, companies like Klarna are ditching almost all of their SaaS tech stack to build their own AI-powered alternatives. Suddenly, you will be speaking with more prospects asking, “Couldn’t we just build this ourselves?”
Differentiation now lives with GTM teams, not with development and product teams. When everyone can build fast, your advantage lies in how well you understand your market. The old GTM playbook simply doesn’t work anymore. Adapt now, or watch your company get commoditized.
#3: The Traditional GTM Tech Stack Is Dying
There are only so many $60K–$100K tools a company can justify when deals are harder to close, budgets are tighter, and adoption is painful.
SaaS spending per employee has climbed to $8,700 in 2024, up 27% from the prior year, while the typical company juggles 106+ SaaS tools.
It’s expensive enough to hire and onboard a full BDR team, let alone other GTM hires. When you add the cost of tools like Outreach, Gong, Clay, and etc., the math stops making sense—especially for Series C and D companies that find themselves compromising on headcount just to afford their tech stack.
The tools meant to make GTM teams more efficient are now consuming budgets that could fund additional headcount—and with CAC payback periods stretching to 20 months for companies over $50M ARR, every dollar spent on software is a dollar that won’t generate returns for approximately two years.
Simplify ruthlessly:
- Audit your stack: What do you actually use daily versus what looks good in the budget deck?
- Focus on essentials: As a BDR, the only tools I truly needed were Apollo.io and HubSpot, and I still found success.
- Don’t overcomplicate the work: Especially in sales roles, it’s the monotonous daily work and consistent nurturing that closes deals—not fancy automation and growth “hacks.”
Less can genuinely be more if you’re using the right tools well.
#4: It’s Time to Be Farmers, Not Just Hunters
The channels everyone is using are maxed out. Outreach inboxes are flooded. Ad fatigue is real. Meanwhile, buying journeys are getting longer in both B2B and B2C. Economic uncertainty plus the rise of self-service AI tools means buyers are being more selective than ever.
Smiling and dialing isn’t going to mask the fact that you need a unique, compelling offer and an acquisition strategy built on sharp targeting—not spray-and-pray volume.
If your team is still working in pure hunter mode, their fighting an uphill battle.
Hunters chase the kill. They go where the prey is right now, strike fast, and move on to the next target.
Farmers think in seasons. They prepare the soil, plant seeds, and water consistently over months before they harvest.
Most GTM teams are stuck in hunter mode. They chase the 5% of buyers who are ready right now, blasting cold emails and burning through lists. Then they wonder why conversion rates keep dropping and CAC keeps climbing.
The farmer understands something the hunter doesn’t. The other 95% of buyers aren’t ready today, but they will be in three months, six months, or a year. The farmer plants early and nurtures relationships before the buying window opens. When harvest season comes, they’re the ones buyers remember..
The solution:
- Build nurture systems that keep your solution top-of-mind throughout longer buying cycles.
- Create campaigns that engage rather than interrupt.
- Invest in brand awareness alongside demand generation. Don’t undermine long-term strategies for short-term wins.
- Hire GTM experts who bring forward-thinking strategies tailored to your business needs. Not playbook regurgitation.
The Foundation
Despite these shifts, one key element remains at the core of successful GTM function, which is a unique compelling offer.
Let me be blunt…
It doesn’t matter if you have junior BDRs grinding or ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-unicorn leaders on your GTM team. If you don’t have a differentiated offer—especially in an already saturated market—nobody is going to spin whatever it is you are offering.
Smiling and dialing isn’t going to mask the fact that you need a unique, compelling offer and an acquisition strategy built on sharp targeting—not spray-and-pray volume.
You can’t farm your way out of having nothing worth planting. You can’t nurture people into buying something they don’t need or something a dozen competitors offer cheaper and better.
The Bottom Line
Q4 is your chance to reset and rethink how your GTM team operates. The old playbooks—hire more, spend more, automate more—aren’t working anymore.
The teams that will win are the ones that:
- Scale thoughtfully instead of aggressively
- Simplify their tech stack and processes
- Build genuine relationships and nurture systems
- Lead with a compelling, differentiated offer
It’s not sexy. It won’t make for a viral LinkedIn post. But it will set your business up for success beyond Q4.
Need help navigating these shifts for your business? Visit my site to learn more about how I work with B2B tech companies with their GTM strategy.
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Dereka M. Smith | B2B Marketing Insights 