Why marketing must reclaim GTM design in the age of AI

As AI-powered workflows become central to sales and RevOps, go-to-market (GTM) execution is increasingly dominated by high-volume, sales-led outreach. This change prioritizes short-term demand capture over long-term brand building and demand creation.

While AI enables scale and efficiency, it often sidelines marketing’s strategic role and compromises customer experience, especially in enterprise settings where automated outreach can do lasting damage. 

Marketing’s core mandate — owning the customer journey, shaping positioning and building trust — is at risk. Without that oversight, companies will trade near-term wins for long-term growth, weakening brand equity and enterprise relationships that sales alone can’t sustain.

To unpack this change, I spoke with Markus Ståhlberg, CEO of N.Rich — a pragmatic and refreshingly clear voice in account-based GTM.

Why generic outreach fails in enterprise GTM

According to the 2024 LinkedIn-Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report:

• 71% of decision-makers say that poorly targeted sales outreach can damage their perception of a brand.
• 42% say they are less likely to consider a vendor after receiving irrelevant or overly aggressive outreach.

In enterprise sales, where target markets are narrower and buyers are more senior, generic automated outreach that assumes intent can backfire. It signals a lack of understanding, frustrates prospects and creates lasting friction. Even if a buyer enters the market later, the damage may already be done — removing the vendor from consideration entirely.

Dig deeper: The GTM revolution is here. Are you ready?

The shift in GTM power dynamics

For years, marketing leaders have struggled under a limited, often misunderstood definition of their role — confined mainly to brand awareness, lead generation and tactical campaign execution. Marketing should have stepped into a larger strategic role as revenue movements evolved.

“AI-powered workflows are shifting control of go-to-market activities away from marketing and into the hands of revenue operations and sales teams,” Ståhlberg said. Many of these tools allow revenue teams to generate thousands of outbound messages at little cost, driving massive volume. The appeal for sales is obvious: fast, automated outreach that feeds near-term pipeline.

But this rapid scale comes with risk that sales doesn’t understand.

“Revenue doesn’t care whether it’s spam or not as long as you get results,” Ståhlberg said. “The volume game has simply been automated and accelerated. But you can’t afford to burn accounts, especially in enterprise. Spam damages your brand.”

Research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute shows that 95% of buyers are not in the market at any time. Prospects who are bombarded with irrelevant, high-frequency outreach quickly lose trust. 

A 2024 study by Exclaimer revealed that 79% of consumers are likely to switch brands that rely heavily on AI for communication, with 41% feeling that AI-driven emails diminish the authenticity of brand messaging.

It can take years to rebuild trust with an alienated customer. The short-term gain of mass AI-driven prospecting risks long-term brand equity, shrinking your future pipeline and undermining sustainable revenue growth.

The rise of the GTM engineer

Central to this change is the emergence of roles like the GTM engineer, a hybrid that blends technical, sales and operational skills to run AI-powered outbound programs. 

In theory, this role reflects a more scientific, data-driven approach to revenue generation — something Ståhlberg supports.

“I actually like the engineering mindset,” he said. “GTM needs to be pragmatic, data-driven and designed as a system. That’s what GTM design is all about.”

However, unrealistic expectations can work against this. Companies often fall into the “rainmaker” trap, assuming they can find a single unicorn hire to solve all GTM challenges. 

“The problem isn’t the role itself,” Ståhlberg said. “It’s that truly multidimensional talent is extremely rare. Too often, companies hire someone for this role who may know the tools but lacks the full perspective to architect buyer journeys, align cross-functional teams, or balance demand creation with capture.”

Automated AI workflows amplify this risk. While automation enables volume, it cannot replace strategic design or nuanced messaging.

“AI isn’t better at messaging than humans. It’s just more volume, and if you’re not careful, that becomes spam,” Ståhlberg said. Current conversion rates benefit from novelty, but these returns will diminish as buyers learn to recognize AI-driven outreach.

Ståhlberg points to approaches like Jacco van der Kooij’s revenue factory as good examples of engineering-led GTM thinking when applied with discipline and design.

“The problem isn’t the engineering approach. It’s when companies expect a single individual to carry the entire system.”

Dig deeper: The hard truth about what AI will do to GTM

The demand creation gap

The core challenge isn’t how to capture existing demand — it’s the much harder one of creating demand where none exists.

Sales excels at converting existing demand but often lacks the capabilities to generate new demand or nurture long-term buyer relationships.

“Sales doesn’t necessarily understand market dynamics or how demand creation works. They are not marketers,” Ståhlberg said.  

Marketers understand that buyers not yet in the market need to be nurtured through content, communication and advertising across multiple touchpoints to build awareness, trust and relationships as part of a demand-creation strategy. Sales messaging often assumes all buyers are in the market. 

Without marketing-led GTM design, AI only amplifies sales’ short-term bias, flooding the market with high-volume outreach that disregards the customer journey and risks long-term brand equity.

“It’s not the tool that solves the problem. It’s the transformation of the GTM motion,” Ståhlberg said,

That philosophy defines how N.Rich engages its customers. While many SaaS companies push product adoption, it starts by addressing the underlying business transformation required for success.

“Our tool is easy to use, but what customers truly need help with is evolving the business — shifting from siloed teams to an account-based GTM where all teams work together in parallel,” he said. 

The company works closely with CMOs, ABM leaders, top management and revenue teams to equip them to achieve complete organizational alignment and guide them beyond platform implementation.

“It’s not about signing a contract and being good to go. We stay closely involved to help drive the revenue cultural change needed to achieve real results. We position ourselves as a solution, not just a product or platform.”

The Helsinki-based company applies Nordic design rigor to an account-based go-to-market platform that accelerates sales cycles without inflating feature sets. After refining its approach with European multinationals, it expanded into the U.S., where buyers now drive nearly half of new bookings — momentum strong enough to propel the recent launch of a dedicated U.S. subsidiary. 

Customers who have adopted the platform highlight its ability to generate intent within target accounts and convert signals into orchestrated plays that improve conversion and win rates, often outperforming larger incumbents.

Marketing must reclaim GTM design

GTM design is where marketing leadership becomes indispensable. Marketing’s role isn’t to fight AI but to architect its application in a broader GTM framework.

“Marketing is the only function that can credibly own the entire customer journey,” Ståhlberg said. “Revenue teams focus on quarterly capture. Marketing must design the system.”

Left unchecked, AI becomes a volume machine detached from strategic goals. In the hands of a skilled marketer, it can enable precision, serving buyer journeys rather than flooding inboxes.

Dig deeper: How AI flipped the funnel and made GTM tactics obsolete

The imperatives for marketing leadership

To reclaim its role as the architect of GTM design, marketing must:

Own the customer journey

Marketing must map and manage the entire buyer journey, ensuring messaging, engagement and content are synchronized with the buyer’s interests and not default to generic outbound.

Architect the GTM framework

AI will not slow down. Marketing must govern how it is deployed across revenue teams to ensure quality, coherence and brand integrity.

Educate revenue leadership

Marketing must lead internal education on demand creation, long-term brand value and customer psychology, moving conversations away from short-term MQL volume toward durable revenue impact.

Guard against short-termism

While pipeline pressures will persist, marketing must protect companies from market oversaturation, AI fatigue and brand erosion driven by reckless automation.

Lead GTM transformation

Most critically, marketing must serve as the orchestrator of GTM transformation — unifying sales, marketing, RevOps and customer success into a cohesive system built for how buyers engage, evaluate and purchase.

The path forward

In today’s AI-powered GTM environment, sales teams will continue to leverage AI for short-term capture. SDRs and RevOps should be empowered to optimize execution. However, marketing — not the GTM engineer — must own system design and long-term strategy.

Successful companies will make marketing the GTM architect, designing systems where AI supports deliberate buyer engagement instead of flooding markets with indiscriminate volume.

“In an AI-powered GTM world, tools can automate outreach, but only marketing can design a system covering the entire customer journey,” Ståhlberg said.