The enterprise B2B Go To Market (GTM) planning process is broken. While revenue teams spend cycles building elaborate coverage models, territory maps, and account plans for the coming year, the world is moving at digital speed past them. By the time plans are finalized and deployed, the market has shifted, buyer priorities have changed, and countless opportunities have been won…by your competitors.
Legacy approaches to sales planning take everyone involved away from the customer and the business of selling, losing weeks or months to a process whose output is stale the moment it’s created. These outdated planning approaches are not just inefficient—they’re sabotaging revenue growth with longer sales cycles, lower win rates, and smaller deal sizes that lead to sellers and organizations alike missing goal.
With most enterprises on the cusp of Q4 planning, now is the time to switch to modern GTM orchestration—that’s both intelligent and continuous—to scale sales excellence and accelerate revenue growth in the coming year.
The fatal flaws of legacy GTM planning
Traditional B2B GTM planning follows a predictable, problematic pattern. Leaders spend Q4 analyzing historical data, building models, and assigning accounts for the coming year. Sellers then build their account plans, relying on the same historical data to determine how to sell to each account. This backward-looking approach creates critical vulnerabilities in planning that manifest as in challenges in execution.
Flawed data creates flawed plans
Legacy planning relies heavily on firmographic data, historical buying patterns recorded in your CRM, and an ‘inside out’ view of the customer. This data tells you the history of an account, missing the critical ‘outside in’ and forward-looking view of each customer, where they are trying to go, and how you help them get there. It doesn’t offer insights into their priorities now or what’s changed since the last time you talked to them, leading to strategic errors and miscalculations in the planning process.
These challenges are exacerbated by the use of traditional intent signals which once promised to revolutionize our understanding of customers and how we prioritize accounts to accelerate growth. Instead, most GTM teams are drowning in noise, chasing ghosts, and watching conversion rates flatline because their intent signals are based on activity, not fit.
The core problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes real buying intent. Legacy approaches conflate activity with intent and intent with fit, creating a cascade of false positives that undermine entire GTM motions and leave sellers chasing deals that’ll never convert.
Static plans ignore market dynamics and real time opportunity
Annual planning assumes markets, competitors, buyers, their priorities, and even your own product and sales processes remain constant for twelve months. But changes are inevitable. Execution built off moment-in-time plans all but ensures sellers show up out of touch, eroding the valuable trust they’ve built with customers.
What’s more, traditional coverage modeling often distributes accounts based on geography, company size, or industry. This is to keep sellers and customers in the same time zone and make each sale as step-and-repeat as possible. But it wrongly assumes customers of similar size, geography, or industry have the same priorities.
They ignore the most critical factor to real-time coverage modeling: which accounts have the specific priorities and/or challenges your solution solves right now. These are the accounts your team should go after today. Instead, accounts are assigned based on arbitrary traits versus attributes that actually indicate fit.
Siloed sales teams and locked account intelligence
Typical legacy GTM planning has managers and sellers furiously building out their account plans, often in a vacuum, in advance of a trigger event, like the start of the fiscal year or SKO. As a result, the assumptions, intelligence, and insights are all decentralized, locked in the account plan—or worse—in the seller’s head.
When accounts are handed off post-sale, as territories change, or when sellers get promoted or leave, what should be institutional knowledge is lost in the shuffle. New sellers start at zero and have to get up to speed on their own to understand each account, where to focus, and which sales plays to run.
Less time selling yields less closed/won deals
Finally, annual GTM planning pulls sellers and sales leaders away from customers and the business of selling. This reduces the amount of time sellers can spend building trust, understanding and confirming customer challenges, and showcasing how their solutions solve those challenges to close deals. Pulling sellers and sales leaders out of the game creates opportunity for competitors to advance and close deals in your absence.
The consequences of legacy approaches to GTM planning can be devastating. Sales cycles lengthen as sellers pursue bad deals. Win rates and deal sizes decline when teams lack current intelligence about buyer priorities to attach their solutions to solving. Revenue predictability suffers when planning is based on assumptions rather than real-time intelligence. This puts sellers and organizations at risk of missing their goals.
Fortunately, the days of GTM planning where sales leaders and sellers scramble to pull together their best guesses for deals over the coming year are quickly fading in the rear view. With them, the reliance on historical, ‘inside out’ data from your CRM—all in favor of intelligent, continuous planning and execution.
The new era of GTM planning and execution: Intelligent + continuous
Modern revenue organizations are turning to AI to solve the challenges of legacy GTM planning to gain competitive advantage in execution. They’re operating with a real-time view of customers—staying ahead of constant changes with AI-powered deeply researched points of view (POVs) for every account. These POVs enable intelligent planning with insights driving action across their people, systems, and AI agents. Here’s how:
Tailored POVs based on deep, comprehensive data and context
In this modern era, AI agents discover and synthesize data from thousands of sources—public and private, first and third party—to deliver a complete view of every customer, their priorities, and challenges. These agents combine ‘inside out’ historical data from the CRM with ‘outside in’, future-looking insights about the customer from all available sources, including 10-Ks, 10-Qs, earnings transcripts, news media, podcasts, and more.
Those same agents then contextualize the intelligence based on your unique GTM motion, sales methodology, and value framework—including your ICP, positioning, messaging, compete battlecards, case studies, and other enablement content—to showcase how your solution uniquely solves each customer’s needs.
The agents proactively assess each of your accounts based on the strength of your solution in solving actual, current customer priorities and challenges, rather than perceived buying intent. This AI-powered ‘POV best fit’ analysis enables RevOps to drive intelligent account prioritization, coverage modeling, and territory planning at scale that focuses their GTM motion on the right opportunities across their entire account universe.
Always current intelligence for every account
Account intelligence is most valuable when kept continuously up-to-date so as changes occur in the market, industry, account, competitors, or internally, your point of view on the customer evolves with it in real-time.
Today’s AI agents continually update and refine account intelligence in the background, alerting sellers, systems, and other agents of changes so they all operate from an always current, always relevant view of every account and, in the case of the sellers in particular, can focus on selling, not change management.
Driving insight to action at scale
The best AI-powered solutions ensure that real-time account intelligence translates into insights that drive action across sellers, systems, and agents. This ensures they’re not only focused on the right deals, but armed with the best sales play, lead with the right solution and value narrative, and engage with the right exec buyers to advance deals forward. This aligns your entire GTM motion to speak in the customer’s language, lead with value, and attach to the customer’s top priority so they buy, buy your solution, and buy it now.
A unified system of intelligence across sellers, systems, and agents
Modern revenue leaders are ensuring their investments in AI-powered intelligence drive value across their GTM motion by delivering a persistent system of intelligence, available on-demand 24/7. This ensures account knowledge transfers pre- to post-sale, through territory and rep changes, and between sellers and agents.
This helps to accelerate onboarding with deep knowledge on your customers, solutions, and sales processes readily available and proactively served to sellers via tailored POVs, narratives, and account plans.
It also enables the agentic revenue organization, providing AI agents with the data and context needed to effectively sell to and support customers alongside your people. This opens up a world of possibility in terms of streamlining your GTM workflows where AI agents (1) identify and prioritize the right opportunities, (2) determine the best next sales play, and (3) serve this intelligence seamlessly to the seller, system, or agent executing the play for truly intelligent and continuous GTM planning and execution.
Such a unified system of intelligence positions revenue leaders to scale sales excellence and accelerate revenue growth with the entire GTM motion focused on delivering a consistent, world-class experience that solves the customer’s biggest priorities and challenges.
The modern revenue organization: Intelligent GTM orchestration at scale
The revenue leaders whose organizations will win will be those who transform their GTM planning and execution from legacy approaches to become continuous and intelligent. Instead of relying on backward-looking data and making guesses about the future of an account, they are enabling modern GTM orchestration agentic transformation at scale informed by deep, real-time intelligence on their customers.
Because in an era where everyone has access to the same prospects, victory will go to those who understand their customers the best, act on that understanding the fastest, and do so with the greatest relevance in demonstrating how their solutions uniquely solve each customer’s specific priorities and challenges.
