Is Your AI GTM Strategy Backwards?

The shift most teams still miss

The original note was blunt: while most marketers are thinking about how AI can improve marketing operations, content generation, and account scoring, many are still losing the forest for the trees. A concrete example is the team that uses AI to predict which accounts are in a buying cycle, then creates personalized content only for that narrow slice.

Useful? Sure. But it is still just the tip of the iceberg. The harder question is how to win over the ninety-five percent of your TAM that is not in a buying cycle right now, because that is where future shortlist preference is already taking shape.

If prospects are using AI-assisted search during their self-directed research phase, content has to carry more of the sales job. It has to explain the problem clearly, frame the stakes correctly, and make your company easier to trust before anyone books a call.

What buyers are already doing

Forrester's 2024 Buyers' Journey work says B2B buyers are adopting AI-powered search faster than consumers. 6sense has been clear for years that buying groups complete most of their journey before they talk to sellers. Put those two together and the implication is obvious: more of the buying process is happening upstream, without you in the room.

If prospects are using AI to assist the purchasing process and not reaching out until the research is largely done, freight marketers need to do four things better than they do now.

1. Influence prospects early and often.
2. Create high-quality content that buyers and buying committees can actually find.
3. Understand customer pain points, buying roles, and the shape of the buying cycle.
4. Develop marketing that makes the right conclusion feel obvious before the sales process starts.

The future of B2B will be less about forcing a sale and more about facilitating a buying experience. In other words, the job is to make the right vendor easier to choose before the market feels like it is being sold to.

What that means for strategy

Once you know which accounts you want to win, who sits on the buying committee, and where those people do their research, you can reverse-engineer a strategy to place the right ideas in the right places at the right time. That is how a brand generates momentum before the deal is formally alive.

It also means knowing what topics are prescient, where your prospects do their research, and what their biggest pains and goals are before you publish a word. When you do, it gets easier to execute campaigns that resonate in the right place, at the right time, with the right prospect.

Being provocative and prescient is still the key. Not performatively edgy. Commercially timely, operationally specific, and sharp enough that the market remembers the thesis.

A market example worth remembering

One of the better examples from the original draft came from Port X Logistics. In mid-2021, when the market was dealing with port congestion, expensive containers, and brutal delays, Port X published a pointed FreightWaves piece arguing that the disunified chassis leasing system was making the problem worse.

• Asia to the US West Coast surged above $18,000 per FEU.
• Asia to the US East Coast climbed toward $20,000 per FEU.
• Asia to North Europe jumped more than 250% year over year.

In that environment, Brian Kempisty did not publish something bland and technically correct. He published something commercially timely, operationally specific, and provocative enough for the market to repeat. The result was more demand than Port X could handle. That is the lesson: be provocative when the market pressure is real, and give buyers a thesis worth carrying around.

Brand perception now includes machine perception

As businesses rely more on genAI for research, the more we need to think about how AI perceives our brands. SEO has been that reality for years. LLMs simply raise the stakes because the market is now asking a machine to summarize who is credible, who sounds differentiated, and who looks safe to keep on the shortlist.

That is why pieces like AI in Freight Is Not a Moat and What Serious Buyers Infer From Your Operating Stack in 30 Seconds matter. They give the market language to think with instead of leaving AI to flatten your story into generic category mush.

If AI is compressing the market's first impression of your company, your job is to make sure the compressed version still sounds like a serious operator worth trusting.