Now I know

6 months ago I walked away from my CMO role with no plan. I started a consultancy, went deep on AI, and ended up building something I didn't expect.

It’s 3rd of October.

I’ve just put up the last gear for a conference in New York. And then I’m done as CMO at MapsPeople. It was the last job on my to-do list. Now I just have a bunch of days in the big apple for myself. Roaming between skyscrapers and thoughts about my future.

That was 6 months ago today. Half a year.

And now I know. What I’m gonna dedicate my energy to.

When fireworks sounded us into a new year, I thought it was all about buyer enablement. Helping others making it easy to buy from them.

I’ve been writing about that in this newsletter some time now.

I even started a consultancy to help companies with it.

But every engagement ended in the same place. Companies came to me to fix how they talked to buyers. To answer their questions better and lower the buyer friction.

And every time, we ended up doing something else first: defining their market, mapping their ideal customers, nailing their value props, choosing how to position themselves. Building their GTM platform, as I like to call it.

Because you can’t answer your buyers’ questions if you don’t know who you should attract. Every message becomes a compromise then.

Once they had that clarity, the next move was obvious. Pick a market and win that first. Run a focused GTM motion against a list of ideal buyers.

And that’s when something clicked.

See, I had a lot of spare time after New York. So I started learning. I read, watched and listened to more go-to-market AI content than should be legal without a prescription. And my builds and experiments stacked even higher.

My biggest learning is this: in GTM AI, context is everything.

The more context you can give the LLMs, the better they work for you. On your positioning, your ICP, your writing style, your channels, your templates.

And that’s exactly what I’d been building for my clients with the GTM platform.

Perfect GTM context.

So when they wanted to run marketing against a list of ideal buyers, I felt right at home. I’ve owned that motion in 3 separate companies and I wrote a book about it. And with my new knowledge about AI, I knew what to build to make that work at a speed and depth that wasn’t possible just a year ago.

The tool I always wanted for myself.

Here’s what I built.

When you work a finite market, a list of named ideal customers, every account matters. You have a fixed number of them. You can’t afford to show up generic, burn a contact and move on. So you do the hard work. Spending time understanding their challenges, figuring out a way in, how to provide value and strategize for each account.

That used to be expensive, messy, and slow. And it kept lots of companies from even attempting to do it.

AI can solve for that.

All you need is GTM context and 3 agents.

Research Agent — An agent that does deep research on your ideal buyers. It creates an account overview, pulls industry insights, maps personas and creates a perfect research profile for each account on your list.

Strategy Agent — Then the strategy agent takes over. It looks at the research and plans an approach based on findings. It maps their challenges to your value props and determines which fits best. It understands your case studies and aligns what content you could use. And maps it to each stakeholder you should reach out to.

Content Agent — Here something magical happens. The content agent sees the research and understands the strategy. So it builds talking points, outreach messages, pitch deck copy and landing page outlines. 100% personalized for that account and stakeholder. And it tells you the reasoning behind it all.

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With those 3 agents alone, you understand the account, have an approach figured out and personalized content to reach out. Here is an example of how it’s coming together:

Working 500 accounts this way was reserved for enterprise deals a year ago and required 4 people or at least 4 different skillsets and tons of time. Now agents are running the full process and the only thing holding you back is how fast your team can put these assets to use and connect with your accounts.

This is a wild, wild time to be in business 🤯

Context is EVERYTHING

To produce great results with AI, context matters more than anything. Instructing the AI what good looks like and how you see the world is key to great outcomes.

I actually think that a good context library is going to be the difference between teams using AI and teams winning with AI.

Here is how I’ve built my library and what is being pulled. I’m still making iterations and adding stuff, but this is the base.

Se more at lowfriction.io

Enough self-promotion.

This excites me. And I hope you too.

My newsletter is going to take a slightly different approach to buyer-first GTM going forward.

I am going to talk more about AI.

I will dive more into the internal GTM side and how to optimize for the buyer.

I am thinking more about account-based approaches.

But overall, this is my thinking space, so it’s not going to be a product newsletter. Most of you on this list came from reading my book Cloud Republic. That is the constant here. How to make buyers see you as the only obvious choice.

The paths to that goal are just widening as we adopt AI.