GTM is changing. Are you?

Welcome to our GTM webinar today. We are very happy to have you all here, and I think that these conversations will be very interesting. The theme of the webinar is "GTM is changing. Are you?" This is actually a follow-up from the GTM Award dinner we had for female GTM leaders in the Nordics in February. We had a big waiting list and we wanted to bring the conversations' conclusions into a webinar so that everyone could participate and listen to the discussions we had at this dinner, which was an amazing success with an amazing room and an amazing vibe across the night.

We are here to summarize the conversations, and everyone who is here is very welcome to our network. We have an hour. If you have questions, there is a question tab in your view where you can submit them. We have someone who will moderate the questions and the chat, so feel free to ask in the question section and comment in the chat. You will also receive the recording after this webinar, so if you need to jump off 15 minutes before we end, feel free—the recording will land in your inbox afterward. Welcome and let's get started. Julia, I'm handing over to you to do a bit more intro for the webinar.

Thank you, Sara. Sara is leading the sales and go-to-market side at N.Rich, but it's not just N.Rich—we as Women of SaaS are hosting this webinar and were also part of the secret dinner and awards around this. I'm very excited to be here and to welcome you all. Women of SaaS is a global business network for women in the SaaS industry. We help women bring together and connect so they can navigate the waters of go-to-market and AI transformation times together. This is what we'll be discussing here today.

I'm really happy to present a powerful panel of women—very strong business leaders and go-to-market leaders from the Nordics. I would like now to hand the mic over to each of you to say two sentences about yourself. The audience knows who you are. Why don't we start with Lina?

Hi everyone, I'm Lina Andolf Orup. I am CMO at Lime Technologies, a Swedish SaaS company. We do CRM and software for customer journeys, and I've been in marketing for over 20 years, always working in different tech companies. I really love how tech enables customer experiences and how it can bring the human and connection together.

Welcome, Lina. Then Erica, you're next on my panel.

Hi, my name is Erica Sandelin. I'm the CEO at Voyado. I've had different roles—CFO, board member, and now CEO. Voyado is built specifically for retail, and we support the full customer journey from the first interaction to long-lasting loyalty. At heart, what we do is quite simple: we connect customers to products.

Perfect.

Also including the pitch—go-to-market leaders are proud. And Dorothy, you?

My name is Dorothea and I'm the CMO at Mouseflow, a SaaS product company based in Copenhagen. We do user behavior analytics for websites. Regarding this topic right now, I'm currently obsessed with Google AI Studio and trying to build my own AI assistant to evolve, pressure test, and maintain our GTM strategy. It's still in progress, but I'm trying to create something here.

Good stuff.

We have a whole section about AI agents, so share more with us later. And now over to you, Frida.

Hi everyone. My name is Frida Ahrenby and I am the CMO of Rillion, a SaaS company. We do AP automation and payments. We're a Nordic company to begin with, but getting quite big in the US right now. So I spend quite a lot of time going over to our Austin office. Otherwise located in Stockholm, I have a background in sales, so my heart is definitely within sales today, but spanning all of GTM.

Very cool. Sara, I think you're going to take us on to the first topic. Why don't you?

Yes, I think we gave the participants an assignment to do 2 sentences per person. It's hard to collect your entire experience in 2 sentences, isn't it? Julia, you mentioned Women of SaaS. Maybe you can tell us a bit about your background too, and I will do the same before we move on.

I like that. My name's Julia. I'm running Women of SaaS, something I founded 3 and a half years ago because I wanted to make sure that women get more visibility. To do that, they first need to know each other and connect with each other, and then create more visibility in the wider SaaS world. We have a very clear focus on accelerating women's careers because we want them to be more influential and get more power in the male-dominated world of SaaS.

We connect women throughout the world and have hubs in many different countries and cities—from Los Angeles to New York to Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Women grow together in these strong networks, accelerate their careers, and bring the business forward. That's what I do on the side, but I'm also a go-to-market leader. I'm VP Marketing of an AI company called Paloa, based here in Berlin. When we talk about AI stuff later, I'm excited to hear your input on this.

Thank you. My name is Sara Storm. I run our go-to-market in the Nordics and Benelux, and I also span into DACH sometimes, depending on where customer engagement is showing. My background is 20 years of doing go-to-market in different formats in SaaS companies, the last 12 to 13 years running teams who sell to go-to-market leaders or revenue leaders. I have been part of the shift where we are trying to move—finally—to a place where we're operating as one team. I'm very excited for the sessions today because we will dive into what we need to do to move to a place where we're operating with one goal in mind through both departments that have been siloed for a very long time.

With that in mind, let's move over to today's themes. These all came from the dinner we had—themes emerged through conversations around the tables. The first topic: GTM roles are being rewritten. We will dive into this in a moment. Then we will talk about ABM. This topic is interesting for us at N.Rich because we are an ABM platform working with customers who are trying to run enterprise marketing. We will discuss if ABM is dead or just misunderstood, or why these projects are failing, because they do.

Then we will move over to the AI and agent discussion, which was very interesting to hear—some people at the dinner had come further along than others. And I wanted to start with GTM roles being rewritten. Since we have a CEO in our group today, Erica, I will direct the first question to you. We know we need to make changes and change is coming. But for you, Erica, from the CEO point of view you have, are the traditional CMO and CRO roles actually fading or are we just rewriting them again, talking about sales and marketing alignment? What is your point of view on this topic and how do you look at it internally?

I think we're entering a moment where AI is changing our industry faster than any other previous technology shift. It's very important for everyone to understand that this is not a hype, not a trend—it's really an infrastructure change. This is not a product thing, not an engineer thing. It's something that will change the way we're selling, the way we're creating value, the way we're analyzing, and the way we're making better decisions.

For me, I want everyone to feel engaged and understand that this is a new way of working in go-to-market, in R&D, in all departments. You will see different use cases of where you can scale and scale faster, and which tools you can use for certain departments. What we are trying to do is find use cases in different departments, find different tools, different guardrails, and then support and test them. I believe a lot of organizations will not be able to run fast enough because they will be scared of making mistakes. I'm very open saying it's okay that we will make mistakes. It's okay if you spend a week trying to get an agent to do a workflow for you and realize you just spent a week of waste. At least you tried. My role here is really to make everyone go out and be brave and try.

I was curious about ownership, because obviously when we talk about the CRO and CMO type of roles being merged and becoming one GTM team—because we see this a lot at N.Rich too—I don't see the challenge with GTM teams being different. I see the disconnect from the rest of the organization. When it comes to ownership, Erica, is that something where you feel the CEO's head should own this transformation and then delegate down to different team leaders? Or how do you see it from an ownership perspective? Because I know this question will show up eventually.

I talked about this to the entire organization. I want the entire organization, including the board and our owners, to hold me accountable for making this transformation. This is not a CMO ownership, not a CRO or CPO ownership. It's me driving that transformation. But at the end of the day, I'm not going to be able to set aside L&D resources and trainings. It will come from everyone trying it out.

Yes, it's my responsibility at the end of the day. But the only way we will get this going is if everyone at Voyado tries it out. We believe in learning by doing. 70% of the transformation will come from each one of us testing, 20% will come from reflection, and 10% will come from an L&D perspective. It's each and everyone's responsibility. Not one person's. At the end of the day, I'm responsible, but everyone working with us ought to take that responsibility.

Yes, it's a huge mindset shift. I completely agree. As leaders, we need to enable the teams, give them the resources, but also hold them accountable at the same time to make sure they understand we're looking at what comes out of it. It's not just leaning back, but actually driving it while giving them the resources. I think both are really important and we see it with our customers too. It's mostly organizational things holding them back because the tools and technology are right now there.

I'd like to ask a question to you, Frida. You are a CMO and you come from sales, so you have that background overall. What kind of skills need to change now in the GTM organization? What have you seen shifting and what do you think still needs to happen?

That's a super good question. Looking back maybe 10, 12, 13 years when I stepped into my first CMO role, coming from sales and product development, I came into a growth company with the ambition to align sales and marketing and make sure we drove towards the same direction with joint targets. I remember that getting the full alignment was difficult. My CEO at that point said we understand somewhat what you're trying to do, but we're not there yet. We were more looking at the sales side of things and not incorporating marketing's impact on the overall sales funnel.

What I'm seeing today is that this is almost not an alignment issue anymore. We have the alignment now, maybe not to 100%, but definitely to 80% or 90% from the companies I've worked with the last couple of years. I think it's more a matter of clarifying ownership and getting sales, marketing, and RevOps—which is the core of GTM—to make sure we have the right architecture in place. This means the process, the tech, the ways of working, and then obviously the capacity, the competence, and the way to actually measure success and make sure we all look at the same success metrics. We've moved away from fighting the alignment issue to putting time and effort into getting the right infrastructure in place, the right tracking, the right reporting, and making sure we look at the same things.

The most important skill sets I look at: there's not a marketer in my organization who doesn't have a high level of business acumen. You have to have commercial thinking in place. You need to understand how money is made and why we should prioritize based on that. If anyone in my team starts to talk too much about leads, I would immediately kill that discussion because it's not important in that sense. Business acumen and commercial thinking are critical—understanding revenue and how we together drive that impact.

I agree with you. The operational roles, especially now in times of AI, are becoming much more important than they used to be. I'd also be interested in whether you see any changes in how sales skills and sales profiles are shifting over the last couple of years. We definitely see some changes, but I'd love to hear your observations without biasing you.

I think the sales skill set needs to be much more tech-driven to start with, because they need to be able to leverage and utilize all the fantastic tools they now have access to in order to become even more efficient. The tech skill set and understanding is definitely important. But I also think that since marketing takes up much more of the funnel until sales actually comes in, it's crucial that sales have much further understanding of what the impact and value are and how marketing helped drive this deal to where it is right now. So it's a joint understanding of the two different domains, and sales somewhat need to catch up.

I'm biased, obviously, but I think sales have more work to do in terms of catching up to get the understanding and broader view of what marketing is doing and why.

I have to jump in. I love that, Frida, thank you. I applaud you. I have a provocative question for the panel because I'm curious about your thoughts. If we were to choose one GTM leader—CCO, CSO, whatever we want to call it—one person heading up these departments, which background do you think is best suited to run the GTM motion today fully, from the marketing touchpoint all the way to close one deal? Are they coming from the CRO side or the CMO side? Tying back to what Frida was just saying, that sales needs to catch up. I will do one by one. Apologies, guys, but I will push you into a conversation. Lina, what is your take? Who would be best fitted to take over the new GTM team if that happened tomorrow? I'm coming for you all. Go ahead, Lina.

I would say, of course, the CMO. But honestly, to me, I think it depends on your go-to-market motion and strategy and how your customer acquisition is done. If it's about building trust with long sales cycles where trust, brand, and positioning are very important, those softer skills might be more marketing-oriented. Whether it's fast-moving with big volume, maybe it's more a sales angle. I think it depends on your motion. If it is transactional sales, the CRO would be more efficient because it's more transactional. If it's more enterprise-led with big long sales cycles where marketing is influencing throughout the pipe, even when sales is doing it, because then you have so many touchpoints—it's not one click and you're done. It's a lot longer.

I'm putting you guys on the spot now. Dorothea, what is your take?

I agree with Lina. I think the CMO would probably be the one leading from the go-to-market strategy to a larger extent than we used to. This is also based on everything Frida said—that we in marketing are way more focused on revenue, bringing revenue in, being analytical. My team pushes to understand the numbers, not just whether we used this word or that word in the content. But I think from my company's point of view, we would at some point have a salesperson take over in the sense that they specialize in both compliance rules, understanding the product better, the use cases, and so forth. They would still close the deal. Maybe at some point, sales and marketing would be so blended that it won't be called a CMO, but a CMO-CRRO role. We used to have marketing and sales directors, and we moved that, and now we may be shifting back a little bit to that role.

And it's more about the background and the experience of the person, I'm thinking. Erica, if you have to choose tomorrow, which of these profiles—not your current staff, but the profiles—which one would you think would be best suited to manage the entire funnel from a background perspective? Where are they coming from?

I would say I wouldn't change because I think there's a reason why I want to have the CMO and the CRO and not have a CCO who has the responsibility for all of them. I would not choose. Thank you for the question, but I will keep it as it is. I think they have fundamentally different backgrounds and responsibilities. I think it's super hard to find someone with all those capabilities—executing, leading sales teams, pushing with forecast calls while thinking about how to keep a strong brand in a couple of years' time. I think it's important to have both voices in the leadership room and not have someone who is skewed towards one or the other. I'm not answering your question.

That's okay. It was very binary, and obviously nothing we're talking about today is this binary, but there is an interesting correlation between the background of people and their experience. I, who have been in sales for 20 years, fully believe that the sales team and their mentality needs to shift over into more understanding of what's actually happening on the buying side of this process—ergo more understanding around marketing—because it will utilize our teams much better together in the GTM ocean when they have that understanding. Sorry for putting you guys on the spot, but I had to. We had to get some controversy in here. Did we have a hand up? No? Okay. It's only mine.

Oh Lord.

With that in mind, Julia, do you think we're ready to move over to the ABM topic?

I think so. And it perfectly fits the first topic because ABM—I never call it ABM. If I can tell you a secret here, I call it ABE, account-based engagement, because it cannot just work. This is your turf, Sara.

Great. So ABM: dead or misunderstood? Just to tell everyone who doesn't know what ABM is, it's enterprise marketing. It's account-based marketing. It's when we're focusing on long sales cycles, trust built over time, and the output is high average contract value. There is a lot of time and effort being put into one single account to move them through the funnel. We can clearly see as an ABM platform that there are huge challenges with getting ABM to operate efficiently. The market goes back and forth—ABM is declared outdated or dead. Or is it the only way to run enterprise marketing? We have two different camps here. A big chunk of ABM projects fail to deliver expected value—I think it's around 83% of ABM projects fail. This is a challenge.

The question becomes: is it because it's a bad operating model, or because we don't know how to run the operating model? One of the things we see is that companies are trying to put SMB logic into an enterprise marketing flow where we're looking at attribution wars—one touchpoint that generated the deal. But it's actually many, many touchpoints, both from sales and marketing, that are required. I wanted to kick off with you, Lina. ABM keeps being declared dead. What is your take? Is the problem the approach, execution, or something completely different?

I think probably the devil is in the execution and the details. I don't think ABM is dead. It comes down to your company and your business. You need to know your target audience, your ideal customer profile, and their pain points and how you meet them. If you go broad—which I think is more dead than ABM—just putting out a big net and seeing what fish are caught. I think it's probably more in the execution and also running it properly, and having the right system. If you align on your ideal profiles and where they are, you need to align that with sales and marketing. That's a true joint effort. And of course, you need a good tool so you share a common view of how your accounts move through often-long sales cycles.

But I think as well, it's not just one thing. It's not purely digital. For us, it's also how you can do more real one-to-one activities, like physical events and everything. I think to me, it's more in the execution, which we are also just in the midst of finding out. Very exciting.

Yeah, I understand. Dorothea, on your end, when it comes to what Lina was talking about—sales and marketing alignment needs to be in place, we need to understand our ICP, we need to drive engagement through digital channels and through physical events and through webinars—it's a huge endeavor to reach these accounts in a way that progresses them into wanting to talk to sales. That's one of the goals with account-based marketing, as it is with most marketing strategies. Dorothea, how do you sustain sales alignment with ABM? What breaks it? What can fix it? What is your take on that?

I think the hard thing about ABM is, as Lina says, the execution and the alignment. If you think you can just automate it between marketing and sales, you're misunderstanding the communication part. To some extent you can automate some of it. Right now we do a lot of ABM and the hot leads coming in are being pushed to sales as tasks, but we still need to continue that alignment. We still need to see—are we seeing any specific markets, any specific personas that are coming in? Could we then start personalizing sequences and outreach to help sales bring the right approach to actually contact those different leads? That's where the breaking point sometimes comes.

I would say it happens to us too. It's been a while since I actually had a verbal communication with sales to look at the leads and numbers, instead of just assuming they get these tasks and will follow up, which they do. But I don't get quality insight into the leads that came in. Were they good enough? I just see that the task was sent. You need to keep having that focus.

I think one of the downfalls is also that ABM sometimes, to ease everyday life, gets brought in as campaigns within different campaigns we do. We sometimes lose that strategic focus of why we picked these accounts in the first place, why we started focusing on them. Now we're just pushing multiple areas and probably at some point it will all be good and leads will come in. But that's most of the time not the reality. You need to keep close, because otherwise you don't know exactly why it worked or why it didn't work.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. The feedback loop is a typical clear signal. We have an alignment challenge. This is one of the signals you can see in an organization when the feedback loop isn't going the right way. We are not talking enough between departments. This is a challenge a lot of companies doing ABM have. Frida, I know that you guys work account-based too. Tell me about your experience. What is the biggest breaking point you see? You can go back to previous experience if you want, but where is the biggest breaking point and what are you doing to fix that rolling?

I mean, to start with, I think ABM is confusing for a lot of people because there are as many definitions of what ABM is as there are stones in the world. It starts with: what are we trying to achieve here? For one, I like to call it ABX instead because I don't think it's marketing, it's experience. It's throwing sales, marketing, and RevOps together—experience. I think it's important to start with the purpose, align on what we're actually trying to achieve, and it's not necessarily something that marketing is driving. It's something that needs to be driven together. I think it starts with joint targets and clarified ICP. It's working ABX both inbound and outbound, meaning sales, marketing, and RevOps team together decide: we have these targets, we decide we want an ABX strategy. What kind of activities, both inbound and outbound, are we going to carry out together?

It doesn't stop as you were talking about, Dorothea, once we've done ABM activities and handed them over to sales. It's actually activities throughout the funnel and reporting on those accounts together with sales. When does it break? Well, I think it breaks if it's only seen as a marketing tactic. We have ICP here, we will target LinkedIn ads based on this segmentation. In my mind, that is not an ABX strategy. It's just a way to segment or target your ads. It breaks when it isn't a joint go-to-market strategy that sales, marketing, and RevOps have decided on together.

The challenge is having the persistence to keep going, because obviously there are going to be other hot leads and deals coming into the funnel. You need to follow that through. Is that more worthwhile in terms of conversion rates and win rate compared to what we decided on? Keep that dialogue with sales so you can tweak the ICP or targeting if necessary. It's a long-term strategy that you need to keep going with.

And there are several moving pieces. We actually have several questions now, so I will start reading them. The first question is for you, Frida, from before: you mentioned you do not want marketers in your team talking about leads. Can you elaborate? What do you mean?

The main KPIs that the marketing team is measured on are ARR, pipeline created, and booked meetings. Obviously, these booked meetings come from leads to begin with. But if we as a team are focused on leads volume and not on the quality of those leads—meaning how they actually convert into booked meetings and pipeline—we are focusing on the wrong thing. That means we talk more about booked meetings and pipeline than leads.

That sounds very logical to me because a lead doesn't necessarily mean that will be a deal on the table. Obviously. The next question is more detailed. What is the best way to run ABM campaigns and how do they differ from current non-ABM efforts? How personalized should they be? I've heard that ABM requires full commitment. What does that mean in practice? And then we have a channel question. How does an ABM strategy differ from what we would call normal—I guess they mean SMB or mid-market promotions. Who would like to answer this question?

Maybe if I can follow up here: what would be really cool is if you could answer it with practical examples. Perhaps you're running both a broader demand generation campaign right now and an ABM one. You can share with the audience what they look like and how they differ. It would be really cool if you had specific examples.

We have a taker, Dorothea, go ahead.

From our side, we use ABM. I would call it more the ABM one-to-many approach, because when we sign a deal, the efforts needed are more one-to-many. We can't just say we signed 10 deals out of the ABM program and talk about the pipeline. That's just not enough. It's very much one-to-many. How we run it compared to other campaigns we do: to some extent we run some of the same ads towards our ABM pipeline or accounts we're trying to reach. But what we do is look at the quality and have a specific budget for the ABM program. For example, when we run ABM through LinkedIn, we don't just put it in one LinkedIn campaign. We separate it. We have the ABM from the ABM platform syncing to LinkedIn and what LinkedIn can help us with. We separate it to understand the value and quality of what's coming in.

We might get fewer leads through the ABM program, but when they actually come in, they're usually quality leads because we've been pushing ads towards their intention. When they actually come, they've been engaging with us and they're actually interested. And of course, there's the next step with sales. If we're lucky, they've approached us before sales even starts. That's the best scenario. That's how we differ ABM efforts versus non-ABM efforts.

Perfect. Thank you. Anyone else want to chime in on the difference between normal demand gen going towards SMB and mid-market versus enterprise-led with longer sales cycles and longer buying committee cycles? Go ahead, Lina.

For me, it's really that it's not a campaign. We do this as a separate motion. We have broader demand generation in digital, physical, etc., but this is really a new way of working. It's a new process. It's true alignment between sales and marketing. We don't talk about leads. We know this is not about generating a lead. We do this more to influence outbound, because enterprise sales is still very outbound and sales-driven with a long sales cycle that follows. Of course, we want to ensure we spend our marketing budget where it matters, on the accounts we actually want to target. We also want to help warm up accounts so sales knows who to approach and when. It's truly a joint sales and marketing effort with different touchpoints. We all influence hopefully that end goal, which is of course revenue and closed deals.

That's a very interesting point because ABM is often misunderstood because it ends at marketing. And you're right, Frida, with what you said before. This is not a campaign. As soon as three departments need to be involved and aligned, it's not a campaign. It's typically an operating system for a certain type of account we're trying to target, where we can pour sales and marketing money into driving these accounts, because some of these deals will include 16 meetings and 20 stakeholders that sales is trying to navigate. We on the marketing side need to make sure that when it is time for that account to talk to us, we are able to reach out in that time.

But in enterprise marketing, very few people will fundraise. Lead generation is not the goal with ABM. Even though it is with SMB and mid-market, because there we will get to a point where they tell us they're interested, which often doesn't happen to the same degree in enterprise marketing. Thank you so much, guys. This was really insightful. I really appreciate it. Everyone asking questions more granularly, feel free to connect with me or anyone in the team on LinkedIn and talk to us, because I'm sure we're open to answering questions. Let's move over to the topic that I know Julia has been excited about for 40 minutes now, which is AI. Julia, go ahead.

Thank you.

Yes.

Everything we just discussed until now—why GTM roles are being rewritten and why we're even talking about ABM being dead—has all been influenced by AI. I think Erica, you said in the beginning it's not just that we're changing our products here or there. It's really changing the whole system and the whole organization. That is why it's top of mind for us. This was a big discussion during the dinner. We would like to get some of your insights and observations. But before we do that, we have a little poll prepared for you, the audience. We want to see how in your go-to-market organizations you're already using AI. Giovanna, if you in the background could please start the poll. Everyone can click on multiple choice options showing where in your organization you're already actively using AI and how it's changing and helping your go-to-market.

You can find the poll under "Poll" on the right-hand side.

So the question is: are you using AI in your go-to-market motion? Multiple options can apply. Is it in your content and messaging? Maybe the most straightforward one. Do you already use it for prospecting and outreach, sequencing, ICP targeting? What about pipeline forecasting? Do you still do that very manually, or do you use AI-generated insights? Then, what about customer insights? Do you go through that very manually or use AI? And then we talked about operations and how important they've become. Do you do internal ops like meeting notes, reporting, workflow automation, dashboarding, and so on already with AI? Please check the ones that apply. If none apply, don't check, because we want to get an understanding of where you're using it and where you're seeing impact. Let me give you maybe 10 more seconds and then we're very curious to see what the outcome is. Jovana, please do the magic and show us the results of this poll. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Let's see if she knows how to do it. Actually, I think we can see it in the poll. If you guys open the poll, you will be able to see the results. I don't know how to push it up so everyone sees it on the screen. Ioana doesn't seem to know either, so it would be on our screen now.

Ioana, can you just give us a quick nod if you're on this and know how to do it? If not, we'll quickly pivot and let people say a few words in the chat to get at least some qualitative inputs. But if you say all good and you're working on it, I can see the results.

Yeah, me too.

Let me—

It's under "Polling."

Yeah, you could actually—

You have to take the poll yourself first.

Of course. I didn't—

Julia, you need to give us your vote too.

Submit. Okay, we found it. Does everyone see it? Hopefully in the audience as well. There is a clear winner. The most straightforward one got 28%, almost 30%. Respondents said they're using AI for content, messaging, and writing copy and campaigns and personalization. I would be shocked if that hadn't been the winner, because I do this every five minutes. Then you're also using it for internal ops. That's the runner-up—anything in terms of meeting notes, reporting, and workflow automation. Top three is prospecting and outreach, ICP targeting, and sequencing for SDR support. It seems to be already automated in organizations or at least you've started with that.

Now I'd like to know from you, Erica, in your organization, and you touched on it a little bit, where do you see AI and perhaps the agentic AI having impact? And then perhaps you can touch on the go-to-market side as well?

AI will have impact on all teams, but if you look at our organization—we're 400 people, 200 within R&D—I think where we will find immediate efficiency gains is within R&D. I think in 1 or 2 years, the way an R&D organization looks will be different. The way a product manager works today will look different. The way an engineer writes code will not be the case. You will have a completely different way of working within R&D thanks to the tooling we have. For Voyado, the biggest immediate effect would be understanding the impact from an R&D perspective. That's why we're reviewing together with HR, our CPO, and our CTO how we should organize the R&D team. We will do that for each business area at Voyado, but we will start with the R&D team.

We see that a lot too. And maybe just to make it clear to the audience, when you say R&D, you mean engineers, maybe data science and that side of the SaaS world?

And also the product team.

Do you have any specific use case you want to share with the team where you're already applying it and seeing results?

We see it everywhere within the organization. If you look at my CPO, he is spending 6.5 to 8 hours in meetings all day. At the same time, he has different agents writing all types of different documents—product strategy and all that. He's really enabling himself and not being forced to work all evenings. He has different agents for different work tasks. The one who is actually the most into AI and building agents is our legal counsel. She is driving the entire company through this transformation. She built a new procurement person called PerUwe in AI. So we have our new procurement officer, PerUwe, who is an AI agent. She has gone from reviewing contracts, which normally took 4 hours, to 40 minutes. That's a really great use case where you would not expect a legal person to be the leading AI transformer at a company, but it is.

Amazing stuff. You need these ambassadors to carry it into the organizations. They inspire others. They think: if legal can do it where you wouldn't immediately think of it, it makes a lot of sense. But they also get inspired by that. Plus everything on the legal side has huge impact on go-to-market because, of course, sales works very closely with legal reviewing all the data master agreements and contracts. If there's a limited legal team, this can positively impact that side of the house.

Erica, we have a question: in what tool was PerUwe built?

PerUwe is built in Claude.

Right. Interesting.

Thank you.

We also had another question: how to use AI for pipeline forecasting, scoring, prediction, revenue intelligence? I'm thinking that's more for the sales side. CMOs in the room, you can push that to Julia when you want to. Sorry, the question is: how do we use AI for pipeline forecasting, scoring, predictability, revenue intelligence? If anyone in the group has examples.

This is a really good question. Thank you, Erica. I'm really curious: where in the pipeline forecasting area are you using AI? Are you using it at all? Or maybe one of the others, where are you seeing impact with AI in your go-to-market teams, whether on marketing or sales? I'd be really curious.

I can start with our pipeline forecasting. We definitely use and utilize our CRM for that, and there's obviously an AI possibility within the CRM. We have an AI-based forecasting in place. But when should you keep humans in the loop? We have one forecast based on CRM/AI and then a forecast based on the VP sales call. We look at the percentage discrepancy between these two forecasts and towards the budget. That's what we're checking more or less every week. As we go, we will see where the best forecasting lies so we can start trusting one or the other more. At this point, we have two different forecasting sources of truth to make sure we're not missing anything.

May I ask what the tool is, or is it native inside Salesforce?

It's native inside HubSpot.

Ah, HubSpot.

Interesting. Very cool. Please tell us in a couple of weeks what was closer to reality, because right now this is exactly what we're all curious about. There's still some human touch or gut feeling that we cannot ignore, or details that cannot be put into a system. But maybe it's something we just believe. Maybe AI can do it better than us. Very curious to see where this goes. Okay, Dorothea or Lina, what about you? Any other use cases with AI in the go-to-market motion?

I can say something about it. From a marketing point of view, we don't forecast right now, but we want to be more predictable. We've been focusing primarily on the sales pipeline. We also use HubSpot, but we also use it to predict churn. That has been a huge game changer for us to predict the overall pipeline—not just new sales, but also what's coming in from a churn perspective. We actually can see if we're gaining the budgets we want to gain. That's been built from health scoring systems in HubSpot. With that predictability, we have different levels of churn. The ones we for sure know have canceled, or those whose health score is bad. Even though customer success is approaching them or whatever we do to keep them, if their health score is still bad, we predict a churn risk in our pipeline.

Super interesting. It's key for long-term advocacy and net revenue retention. That's a good one. Lina, what about you? Anything on the marketing side that you are excited to share?

Absolutely. Of course, HubSpot exists, but we also have Lime Technologies. We also do CRM and have a lot of AI functionality and agents rolling out as well. Of course, we are dogfooding and using that a lot across sales, marketing, and customer service. Churn alerts, handling tickets that come in, categorizing them, providing analysis of the best solution, etc. So a lot of things we're using internally. For marketing, the obvious one is the first one that also got the most answers in the poll—content and messaging. I think that's the easiest way to start. We do a lot of single jobs right now where each role has their own ways of working. What excites me is connecting the dots across the customer journey. How can we use sales insights for marketing, and all the data we have around customers? What questions do we get in sales calls, and how can we answer them in marketing in a more automated way? We're going from being assisted or bouncing ideas and getting insights from AI to actually automating some of these very manual and boring tasks, frankly. That's where we are at the moment.

I love that you said everyone has their own way of working. I think that's the reality in a lot of companies. We still have our own bots and agents, but they are not shared. One of the things we're doing at N.Rich is building data access. This is one of the challenges. We have a lot of data in different systems—customer success systems, support systems, the CRM environment, other platforms for social media and wherever we track data. Understanding customer sentiment both in very early stages in the open pipe and into land and expand is something very hard for a person to find. This is one of the things we're building now that we launched about 3 weeks ago. It can read through meeting notes and CRM and pull from our support system to provide a foundational baseline of what is happening in this account right now from all these sources.

The next step would be to activate that agent to do things with that information, not just inform us about it, because then we're still looking at it as a prompt engine rather than an agent that can self-sustain in different ways. I love that you said that because I think that's the reality for most of us. Dorothea, go ahead. You get a minute and then we need to start wrapping up.

I actually wanted to kind of round up what Erica started with—the whole orchestrating it. I think with AI tools, it's not necessarily anymore about adding, adding, adding more tools. It's of course about exploring and testing them out. There are so many tools out there you could spend all your time just testing if you want. But I feel, and for us at Mouseflow at least, we're really at that stage of getting it orchestrated through the management team and streamlined. I don't think there's one department, or maybe some individual, but not a single department that doesn't use AI in their everyday tasks. Some more advanced than others. We're starting to see too many duplicates—same thing, same workflow we're working on, same use case. We need to get that orchestrated so we get better alignment.

We're probably doing a lot of double work across departments right now because there is no real title or role for orchestration of AI initiatives. That's a really, really good point. I think we need to start—

Before you do that, I would like to drop one important term. This is really obvious what we do as well. It's called AI agent sprawl. This is what's keeping CEOs and C-suite up at night because there's so much happening in different parts of the organization that is going in parallel and isolated. AI agent sprawl and bringing this together is really one of the next big challenges of especially large organizations. What we're looking at at Paloa, and also helping with, is an AI agent management platform. This orchestration style you'll also hear much more about in the next couple of months, probably.

That's the backside—

That's the backside of the trial and error that we also need to go through. But yes, sometime we need the governance and the structure as well.

We really do, and it's time for that now, I think, for most of us to start orchestrating. Okay, great. Thank you so much, everyone. I want to summarize the key takeaways I found throughout this conversation. We discussed that GTM roles are evolving and not fading. We talked about ownership, which from Erica's point of view is very clear: I'm the owner, but I'm not the executioner. We need everyone to actually execute and work together. Alignment is the foundation of your GTM engine. We have been talking about this since 2016. It keeps becoming more complicated because of how the market complexity looks.

We also see skill shifts. We need to move from the role you're in—marketing or sales—to having revenue thinking across all these different types of roles in our different teams. The GTM leadership obviously depends on the motion we're running, depending on what type of accounts we're trying to target and what motion we're running from SMB to mid-market to enterprise perspective. When we dove into ABM, the summary was: misunderstood and maturing. We're moving from where it breaks—alignment again. Once we get alignment through the departments, we identify through data that we have marketing, sales, and RevOps, or marketing ops. We all need to work as one unit from a perspective of flow, but we need to be able to cut off points where responsibility shifts through the journey.

Then we dove into AI. Julia, do you want to summarize what you heard today, or should I take that?

I think we all know we're still experimenting in many ways. Now it's really on us to first enable the teams, but then also make them accountable for it. Motivate them to actually use this and don't see it as a threat. I don't think in SaaS companies it's so much seen as a threat. It might be in other businesses for sure. But also make sure the organization knows they're being included. It's something they can grow with and we want them to do it while we're already looking ahead. There's so much happening in parallel. We need to be able to bring this together at one point through technology but also through strong leadership.

But it's an exciting time and we'll learn together because we're just at the very beginning of this big new transformation. I hope that in half a year or so we can get together again and see how far we are along then, because already today it was great to get all these exciting insights from you women of SaaS here. Thank you very much for sharing that with me and the whole audience.

Thank you so much, guys, and that is a wrap. Have a good afternoon, everyone. Happy afternoon.

Thank you.

Bye, guys.

Bye-bye.