The next era of GTM tech

Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Clarify) on how to build a tech stack that lasts

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and welcome to Growth Unhinged where I explore the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups.

Y’all know I love talking about go-to-market (GTM) strategy. The sad reality is that our dated and bloated GTM tech stacks hold us back from executing GTM plays with confidence. GTM tech is acutely painful for modern software businesses combining PLG, sales-assist, and scaled/AI-enabled outbound motions. But I probably don’t need to tell YOU that…

Ask 10 people for an expert in modern GTM tech and probably 8 of them will tell you Austin Hay. Austin teaches THE MarTech course at Reforge. He’s led growth and GTM tech teams at scaleups like Ramp, Runway, mParticle, and Branch. And now he’s co-founder at Clarify where he’s building the future of GTM tech. Keep reading for Austin’s perspective on how to build a stage-appropriate tech stack that lasts.

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Revenue teams are running up against a brick wall. As increased focus on complex outbounding motions rises, the need and desire to invest in their CRM stack as they’ve invested in their platform stack gets more acute. 

But without the option-rich ecosystem of their marketing counterparts, where can they find relief? How can we, as revenue professionals, do better to get more out of our tooling without just buying more tools for basic operations and drowning in tech debt, bloat, and cost? 

This is an impossible question to answer in isolation. But the first step in designing a modern, flexible stack that meets our needs is to better understand how we got here and the role of the CRM in the future of our work. 

Over the last decade, the concept of the stack has solidified in martech and revtech as CDPs and CRMs have taken up this center of gravity mantle. We can break this solidification into four eras:

1. Sales tech (2015), 

2. B2C martech (2017), 

3. B2B2C GTM tech (2022), and 

4. Decentralized GTM tech (today)

Below, I’ll share some of the hard-won lessons I’ve learned from a decade of helping dozens of tech companies create and maintain GTM tech stacks across these eras. We’ll also discuss what the current age of the revtech stack looks like and how modern PLG companies can build toward flexibility (ft. some tangible assets from my martech course with Reforge to help you get started). 

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What makes a “good” modern GTM stack 

Modern GTM stacks are built around four core data components: inputs (where we get data about our customers from), storage (where we keep our customer data), capabilities (tools that enrich our data or endpoints like analytics tools), and federation (how data gets moved between the other components).

How “good” a given GTM stack is less about the quality of any of the individual tools within the above categories and more about how well they play together. This is what we refer to as stack flexibility, and it’s the name of the game in operating rev and martech systems today. 

Why does this flexibility matter so much? There are five main reasons: 

1. Novel marketing and revenue challenges mean moving more data. If you can’t move data because of your vendors or system complexity, you’re screwed. 

2. GTM teams need to build audiences and segments quickly. Flexibility lets you create audiences across a variety of tools and stream audiences to many destinations (especially if you’re taking a warehouse-first approach). 

3. Companies need to avoid creating tech debt and complexity burden. Last-minute business challenges (like finding out your DTC vendor made an API change at the last minute before a big mailer campaign) require speed and ability to handle well without causing more tech debt and system complexity. 

4. Business needs and tool options change quickly. Having a highly-flexible stack means you can easily onboard and offboard vendors to create systems that fit your unique needs with the best tools possible without confusing/burdening the team or partners. 

5. Building world-class software requires world-class debugging. Flexibility in your stack lets you find, assess, debug, escalate, triage, and resolve stack issues quickly. 

In short, stack flexibility gives PLG and B2B2C companies the underlying flexibility they need to support complex customer journeys and gain insight into how users interact with their product and different channels. 

So, how do we go about building toward flexibility (and limiting the amount of hair-pulling we’ll do over our tech a few years down the road)? This is a complex question, but–through auditing dozens of martech and sales tech stacks over the years–I’ve developed a framework that can help. This is the same framework I used to guide Ramp toward a system north star in 2022. 

PSA: For this to work, the revenue motion needs to be treated like a first-class engineering discipline (i.e. more teams should be investing in engineers as part of their GTM machinery). 

The framework is anchored around four core principles: 

1. Redundancy: Multiple vendors offer similar functions.

   1. Good: Flexibility for discrete, decentralized actions (e.g., two tools sending audiences).

   2. Bad: Exact same capabilities causing confusion (e.g., two attribution tools).

2. Coupling: The amount of dependency between vendors or systems.

   1. Good: Low dependency for easy vendor changes (e.g., analytics library around CDP).

   2. Bad: Single tool bottleneck breaking system upon removal (e.g., random connections). 

3. Interoperability: How well tools work together and for your needs.

   1. Good: High data exchange capacity for business tasks (e.g., push/pull/audience integrations).

   2. Bad: Incompatibility forcing workarounds (e.g., brittle Hubspot integration).

4. Focus: Tools solve specific problems with intentionality.

   1. Good: Discrete problem-solving, driving good decisions (e.g., data diagram, permissions).

   2. Bad: Unclear best use, tied to bad coupling (e.g., shiny-tool syndrome without pruning).

Source: the marketing technology course @ Reforge 

There are more options for GTM tools than ever before, with wildly ranging capabilities and quality. Below, we’ll take a look at how we got to this point in the revtech landscape, and what modern orgs can do today to future-proof their stacks as they grow. 

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How the GTM stack evolved (and what it means for modern orgs)